Note from Annette

History isn’t all about the Big Names, despite what most people remember from school, or it wouldn’t make sense, or take up much of historians’ lives in reading and writing about it. The closer you get, the more complicated to becomes . . . and the more interesting, and the more 3D. That’s why, even if you don’t think today’s subject floats your boat, I ask you to give it a go with that in mind.

When we think of slavery in early America, we think of the Southern colonies, like Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia, right? Think again. Enslaved people were all over Britain’s American colonies in the 18th century, even New England (Brits: Massachusetts and its immediate neighbors—map helpful). Yes, I’ll repeat that: There was slavery in 1700s Massachusetts, Connecticut, and all the other stomping grounds of the people formerly known as Puritans.

Today, I’m riffing on a book that’s excellent academic history, and also full of extraordinary stories well told. I’m talking Dr. Gloria McCahon Whiting’s Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family in Early New England. Belonging has knocked my socks off, and you know the best thing about it? It’s a great read! Tales posts are typically on-ramps to help you get into a scholarly book. This time, as sometimes happens, I’m almost embarrassed to give Belonging the NBH treatment, because it’s written to be accessible to normal people as well as to historians. As ever, all I do is re-tell a sampling of stories in my own inimitable way, with my comments and asides. The glory goes to Gloria Whiting, who dived deep into many archives, and resurfaced with fistfuls of stories that I really didn’t expect to have happened, much less survived in documents.

Today, I rewrite a sampling of Dr. Whiting’s stories, but I can’t puff myself up smugly, and imply I’m doing a better writing job than the author. So I hope she will forgive me, and that she will definitely not send a drone to drop a boulder on Non-Boring House.

Baby Sue was born at the turn of the 18th century, and she was born into a large family, headed by wealthy merchant and Massachusetts politician Elizur Holyoke. How big of a deal was Elizur Holyoke? His name would one day be on the map of Massachusetts, in the form of a hill named Mount Holyoke, and, much later, the far more famous Mount Holyoke College was named for that hill.

By the time Sue was born, Elizur’s wife Mary had given birth to eleven children, and eight of them were still alive. Sue was not one of those kids. Yes, she did belong to Elizur and Mary’s family, but not in the way you’re probably thinking. Eighteenth century families often included what we would consider unrelated people, people we would think of as employees. In fact, they were far more connected than the “families” modern corporations keep telling their employees they are.

Elizur and Mary were not Sue’s parents as today we would understand the word “parents”. Elizur Holyoke was not Sue’s biological, adoptive or foster father. He owned Sue, just as he owned her mother. That’s because Sue and her mum, whose name is not recorded in surviving records, were enslaved by Elizur Holyoke.

If Sue’s mother had been a European indentured servant, she would have become free after a few years of working for the Holyokes. Sue would not have been enslaved at all. But as an enslaved woman of African descent, Sue’s mum was sentenced to live her life for the benefit of the Holyokes, or whoever they sold or assigned her to. As the daughter of an enslaved woman, Sue was destined for the same fate, from the first moment she drew breath, until the second she gasped her last.

This didn’t turn out as we might expect. Fact is, the Holyokes didn’t want Sue at all. This might surprise you, and it certainly surprised me. When Sue was born, in the 1700s, babies born to enslaved women were considered valuable (in cash money terms) in the places where there were the most enslaved people. We’re talking the tobacco and rice fields of Britain’s Southern colonies like South Carolina and Virginia, and the sugar plantations of the British West Indies, like Barbados. But Sue was not born in these colonies. She was born in Massachusetts. One way in which New England slavery was different was that enslaved babies were born worth not much money, or no money at all.

Laing, that’s weird. How could enslaved babies be considered worthless in money terms, when enslaved people were considered property?

Good question, and the answer, like so much of history, is about context, the times and place in which Sue was born, lived, and died. Her life took place entirely within the 18th century, and entirely in Massachusetts. New England in the 1700s was a place in which people didn’t live the libertarian dream of being rugged individuals in wide-open spaces. They lived in various kinds of communities, starting with cities, towns, and villages, and many of them lived on small farms rubbing against their neighbors’ farms, and raising a wide range of crops, like wheat and vegetables and dairy, and animals, like pigs, cattle, and chickens. This made New England a very different place than Britain’s Southern colonies and its islands in the West Indies, where large factory-style plantations grew huge fields of a single crop, like tobacco or rice or sugar.

On big Southern and Island plantations, large numbers of people were forced to work. These had been mostly English people at first, on a limited-term contract of unfree labor, to repay the cost of bringing them across the Atlantic, people called indentured servants. More and more, as the supply of people willing to risk their lives in hot climates dried up, they were being replaced by enslaved people from Africa and captured Native people. Most, but not all, were men.

In the South and on the Islands, as more enslaved women arrived (and they were a trickle until later in the 18th century) those enslaved people who were too old or disabled to work in the fields acted as childminders, caring for babies and small kids. Their unpaid work meant that childcare cost wealthy enslavers almost nothing, so they could tolerate waiting for infants to become old enough to be put to work, usually at six or seven years old, or be sold for a handsome profit when they were older.

In New England, most enslaved people lived on small farms or in households, often in the homes of people who were what we might now think of as middle class, where they were typically the only enslaved person. I suddenly think of domestic servants in late 19th and early 20th century Britain: We think of big staffs in places that looked like Downton Abbey, but most domestic servants worked alone or in groups of two or three in middle-class homes.

In 18th century New England, most people were used to living at very close quarters. And that included enslaved people, who lived with their enslavers, eating dinner at the table with them, and maybe even sleeping in the same room. A typical enslaved woman in New England did domestic work. If she got pregnant, her baby was seen as a burden by her enslavers. That’s because she was sentenced to a life of domestic drudgery for the benefit of her enslavers, not living her own life or caring for her baby.

So, in 18th century New England, enslavers often placed ads in newspapers in which they offered babies for sale (cheap). Quite a few of these ads offered babies for free. Some even offered to pay someone to take away an enslaved baby. Yes, believe it or not, this was happening in Massachusetts, early America’s Bible belt, a Christian society where the family was at the center of God’s plan for human society. How on earth, we might wonder, did Massachusetts people justify enslaving others, much less the cruelty of separating mothers from babies? Even more amazing, how did New England later end up as the Ground Zero of the movement to abolish slavery? I can’t possibly even begin to tackle those questions in this post without dropping down massive rabbit holes. But I can get us started with some clues.

To us, eighteenth-century New England was an alien world. The emotional impact of separating mothers from babies was just not a serious consideration for most enslavers. I mean, even in recent times, it wasn’t a serious consideration. In early Massachusetts, skin color, alien culture, a person’s enslaved condition, and enslavers’ material self-interest branded mother and child as lesser humans at best, even though it was clear to anyone with eyes that this wasn’t true. Black babies were even born in the same circumstances as white babies in this overwhelmingly white society: Their mothers squatted on birthing stools, supported in the arms of other women, most of them white, and they delivered infants whom almost everyone understood were real babies. They were also immediately understood to be different, and destined to live lives apart.

Six weeks after her birth, little Sue Black (as she became known) was sold by Mary Holyoke for six shillings, the price of a pair of shoes or a wheelbarrow. The deal was done in a tavern, in the presence of Sue’s enslaved mother whose response, like her name, went unrecorded. Mary Holyoke, as seller, must have thought she got a very good deal from the baby’s purchaser: She got cash, and she didn’t have to give away Sue for free, or pay someone to take her away. She likely expected to get less than six shillings from Mary Norton, the buyer. Mary Norton, on the other hand, thought six shillings and raising a baby small prices to pay for the bargain of a servant who, once she was seven or so, would wait on her hand and foot for life.

So Sue’s mother, who had carried her baby through the streets of Boston, following Mary Holyoke, and who had watched the two women haggle over the cash value of her baby, was now forced to give her up to a stranger, Mary Norton. We don’t know if Sue’s mum pleaded for her child. We do know she was there. Unimaginable to me, a modern mother. But I cannot assume how she reacted: Maybe she saw Sue as a burden. Maybe she was just resigned to losing her. Maybe she sobbed as she handed over her daughter to a white stranger who saw her only as an investment. Again, the documents are silent.

And Sue? Separated from her mother and carried by ship from Boston to Manchester, about thirty miles up the coast, she would grow up in a family, but as a solitary child . She would be the only member of the Norton family who was enslaved, and the only child who was black. Was she even a member of the Norton family at all? By the standards of early New England, she was: Servants and slaves were regarded as members of a family, a household, which was considered first and foremost an economic unit rather than people bound by emotion and genetics. Just as in England, this kind of family was typically headed by a man, the only exceptions being women who were widowed or single. Grandparents, interestingly, typically lived in their own households.

Mary Norton was not the head of her family. That was her father, George, so long as he was alive, and then would be her mother, not her brother. Mary was young, a daughter of the family in which she lived, and her commitment to raising Sue to be her servant kind of came and went. Mary Norton later launched a lawsuit claiming an adult Sue and her descendants as her property, and that’s how Dr. Whiting prised this story from the historical record, and why she is able to share it with the world, and why I am able to write about it.

In general, we think of slavery in New England, if we think of it at all, as lower on the scale of awfulness than the brutal institution in places like South Carolina and Barbados. But maybe we need to consider New England’s slavery’s awfulness to be different, not better. While enslaved children born in South Carolina had a chance of staying with their mothers and within most of their extended family and community, enslaved kids in New England often grew up cut off from them all, mother included. Sue was one of those children. She was among about half of enslaved New England people who were the only enslaved people in a house.

Sue’s childhood was straight out of a Roald Dahl novel, only worse. Records show that she was verbally demeaned, constantly reminded that she was an outsider, and physically attacked with kicks and blows. No other enslaved people were on hand to comfort or support her. Only when she reached the age of seven would a child like Sue be regarded as useful. Until then, in the crucial years of childhood, an enslaved child who was the only black person in a free white household was very much alone. When I think about that, I think of little Sue as wee Hoosen, Jr., my son, and I weep.

Sometimes, enslavers seem to have had pangs of conscience: They asked in their ads for someone nearby to take a black child, if possible, so (presumably) child and mother could remain in contact. Some sold mother along with child, “which must go with her.” Or they offered a baby as a BOGO offer: Buy the mother, get a free baby.

Historians are about explaining rather than judging, but no reputable historian would be willing to defend the morality of slavery, or be so lacking in empathy as not to be moved by the horror of it all. Whether enslavers merely reflected the culture of their times, or whether they knew damn well what they were doing, remains debated. Dr. Whiting does not let enslavers off the hook, even when they tried to limit the harm they caused: “Black families were still dissolved to convenience white ones.” This was a choice for wealth enslavers made, not a necessity for living, and before we judge, I gently suggest, let us consider the times we have bought the cheapest good, not the one is fairly traded. Historians are well aware of the dangers of seeing faults in people of the past, to avoid seeing our own.

The impact of sale and slavery on an enslaved child, his or her mother, father, or caregiver, if any, was not an issue for most people who enslaved them. And when a baby was sold in a tavern in Boston in 1700, nobody batted an eye. This was normal. But it wasn’t normal, was it? Not for white babies, certainly. Not in a self-consciously Christian society founded on families. No wonder we sense ill-ease, even guilt, from those ads trying to dispose of babies.

Sue was only six weeks old when she was sold. Her life and Mary Norton’s six shillings investment were now very much in danger, since Sue’s mother would no longer be able to feed her. Mary Norton now had a stroke of good luck: Another guest at the same Boston inn, Penelope Hadlock, was, like Mary Norton, from Manchester, Massachusetts, and she agreed to feed Sue for five shillings, at least until they returned home.

Once Mary Norton arrived in Manchester with Sue, Mary hired a neighbor, Abigail Williams, to be Sue’s wet nurse. Sue was taken to live at the Williamses, where she stayed for about three months. This was a side gig for Abigail Williams, a white mother whose family, many years later, recalled her nursing a black baby. Wet nursing (as it was called) wasn’t an act of compassion, or a blow for Sue’s equality: It was a financial transaction.

If a white woman nursing a black baby in the 18th century seems surprising to us, that’s because this would indeed have been highly unusual in the South, where few poor whites lived by the slave labor camps that housed large African populations, and where there were enslaved women available to breastfeed an enslaved child. In New England, most of women who were able and available to breastfeed were white. In all areas, black women often breastfed white babies. Some enslavers in New England may have wanted rid of black babies so that the women they enslaved could earn money for them by nursing white children, although this was rare, assuming it ever happened: There were plenty of white wet nurses in New England, white women who made a little extra money by taking in babies, and competition kept their prices low.

Once Sue was about six months old, Mary Norton collected her from Abigail Williams, and started her on a dodgy diet of “pap”, which was breadcrumbs or flour mixed with water, cow’s milk, or broth. Had she been kept with her mother, Dr. Whiting, suggests, Sue would likely have remained on more nutritious breastmilk for several more months. But I doubt many people in the early 18th century grasped why that mattered, and, remember, not much value was attached to an enslaved black child.

Living with Mary Norton and her parents, baby Sue does seem to have been cared for: She was wrapped in blankets against the cold, and was seen by a neighbor lying across Mary’s lap. Mary paid a local man to build Sue a little wheeled mobility device to help her learn to walk. As Sue got older, Mary (or someone else) may have taught Sue to read, maybe a little writing and math. None of this meant that Sue truly belonged.

Sue was not surnamed Norton, the family name, but called Sue Black, a name reflecting her skin color. Curious visitors never stopped asking—in Sue’s hearing—why the Nortons kept a black child. How did that happen, they asked? Mary would tell them the story of buying Sue in Boston. Other Norton family members wondered why they had to tolerate the awkward presence of a small black child, an object of curiosity and gossip about the family. Mary’s mother resented having to pitch in with childcare, and Mary’s brothers, according to a witness, kicked little Sue and told her to get lost.

By then, by the time Sue was out of babyhood, Mary Norton was gone from the home. Soon after Sue turned one, Mary —already five months pregnant —was married. Had she lost interest in Sue? Had buying this black child been a teenage whim, a bad investment? Whether for sentimental reasons or for the return on her six shillings, Mary wanted Sue to live with her, but her mother—the same mother who had resented the black baby in her household— now asked to keep Sue and raise her, saying she had changed her mind because “she had taken such a fancy to it that she did not know how to part with it.” Notice the “it”.

Maybe Mary’s mother had become attached to Sue. Maybe she was worried how Mary would cope with two babies, her own and Sue. Most likely, however, Mrs. Norton was picturing a future with Sue as her own slave. So Mary and her mother struck a deal: Sue would remain in the Norton household, where her mother would raise her. Once Sue was old enough, she would work for Mrs. Norton (or be hired out to work elsewhere for her profit). When Mrs. Norton died, ownership of Sue would return to Mary.

As Sue grew, by the time she was seven or so, she worked for the Nortons, and especially for Mrs. Norton. She washed clothes and ironed them. She cooked and brewed beer. She milked cows, and made candles. She spun thread and sewed clothes. “By the time she was a young woman,” Dr. Whiting writes, “Sue had made herself indispensable to the household.”

Being a pillar of the Norton family did not protect or free Sue, or the three sons she bore as an adult. Her first child, Abijah (a Biblical name Sue may not have chosen) was sold three times before he was six years old. Abijah remained in the area, near his mother, but that was by no means guaranteed: When he turned seven (and could be sold for a profit) the woman of the couple who enslaved him suggested selling him South, to the tobacco fields of Virginia. Whether or not Sue knew of this threat is not clear.

While pregnant with her second child, Jethro, Sue herself was sold to Mrs. Norton’s son, one of the same boys who had bullied her as a youngster. When Jethro was still a toddler, he, too, was sold, to a local man in Manchester. By now, Sue was pregnant with her third son Matthew. And while she was expecting, Mary Norton sued to reclaim Sue and all of her sons as her property. And won. Sue’s family was still enslaved, however, and was not reunited.

Annette’s Aside: Agency and Sources

When historians try to show how truly horrific slavery was, we risk portraying enslaved people only as powerless victims. If we focus on what we call agency, on enslaved people working to gain as much control as possible in their lives, we worry that people will conclude that slavery wasn’t so bad. This is the sort of problem that keeps historians awake at night: How do we show that slavery was horrific, and that people pushed back for control?

And then there’s this problem: How do we recover the voices and actions of enslaved people themselves, when most documents were written by enslavers, or people sympathetic to slavery? The good news is that we can get a lot of info from those same documents, by learning (as we do) to read through them, using empathy and imagination as well as knowledge.

Here’s one example: When Virginia enslaver William Byrd wrote of whipping “his” slave, a young boy named Eugene, for wetting the bed, and of forcing the kid to drink his own urine, we not only can get a sense that Byrd was a sadistic tyrant, but of Eugene’s perspective: His bedwetting was likely set off by the his fear of brutal punishment. This is not to say that getting at truth about the lives of enslaved people is easy, even when we have the voices of the enslaved themselves.

I remember, when I was in my twenties, picking up a book of interviews from the 1930s, conducted with formerly enslaved people under the auspices of the Federal Writers’ Project, a New Deal program that employed young writers to build a historical record, and to broaden people’s understanding of American history.

I was shocked by what I read in those interviews. Formerly enslaved people often downplayed the horrors of slavery, and even expressed nostalgia for the olden days of slavery. They sounded like ambassadors for the Daughters of the Confederacy, not traumatized people. This made no sense at all, and I decided not to put any stock in these interviews. Only years later did I come to understand what had happened, and here’s one clue: The interviewers were typically college-educated young white professionals, and the interviewees were poor, black, elderly, and living in the South. Talking about the FWP interviews could be several posts by itself, and one of the things we need to talk about here at NBH is how historians work with imperfect sources—which all of them are.

What did Sue make of her life, surely a lonely and powerless one? On that, the archives are silent. But in every other chapter of this book, Dr. Whiting shows enslaved people in colonial New England taking action to hold their families and communities together, to protect each other.

Self-defense in a system in which enslavers had absolute power over people could be drastic. In Massachusetts in 1755, an enslaved man named Mark and his friends Phillis and Phoebe worked together to end the rule of their abusive enslaver, a man who raped the enslaved women in his household and prevented Mark from visiting his wife. These three enslaved people’s situation seemed hopeless, so they took the only route they could think of: murder. Theirs is a startling story, and, like most such stories, did not end well for anyone, especially the enslaved people who fought back. This also helps us understand why violence was not the first choice of enslaved people who pushed back against slavery.

So if they couldn’t just off the person who enslaved them, and if escape seemed impossible or undesirable (where would fleeing enslaved people go in 1700?), then what could they do? The answer is that they did a lot to reclaim their lives, even in the South. But this being New England, where black people were minorities in their communities, where they were used to dealing with white people directly, the stories are especially complicated and fascinating.

Take the Vassalls. They were a black family in mid-18th century Boston who were enslaved by a white family of the same name. In this story, it was the white people who ran away. The white Vassalls decided to remain loyal to Britain during the American Revolution, and fled to their estates in the West Indies, which had not joined in with the mainland colonies in rebelling against London, and to England itself. They left behind their house and land in Cambridge, the Boston suburb that was and is home to Harvard University, along with the people they enslaved.

The black Vassalls stayed where they were. Well, most of them did: Little Darby, aged six, was another story. As a baby, he, like so many black babies, had been taken from his mother and family, and given away to an enslaver named George Reed, Jr., who lived about ten miles away in Woburn (Brits: Yes, named after the one in Bedfordshire, now part of Milton Keynes, but pronounced Wooburn in Massachusetts). Young Derby somehow learned who his family were, and where they lived.

So, on the death of George Reed, this six-year-old boy walked alone through war-torn Massachusetts. He headed for Boston, even as refugees poured out of the city in search of safety, walking through the countryside. Nobody seems to have bothered the lad. In New England, unlike the South, a black person of any age walking alone did not excite suspicion of being an escaped slave, even though that was what Darby was.

On the way, he would have passed the sun bleached skelton of Mark, who had been executed for the murder of his enslaver, and whose corpse had been hung in chains after he was hanged, twenty years earlier, as a warning to other enslaved people who might consider rebelling. Did Darby find Mark’s bones and fate disturbing, Dr. Whiting asks? Or did he just register this macabre sight as a well-known local landmark, reassurance that he was going the right way? Some questions have to remain unanswered, awaiting the recovery of documents that probably don’t exist.

What is known, Dr. Whiting tells us, is that little Darby made it to his real home, a massive mansion owned by the Vassall family who had enslaved his parents, and fled without any of their property, including Darby’s parents and siblings.

Sometime soon after, the Vassall house became the Boston HQ for George Washington. The black Vassall family kept busy, so nobody would ask awkward questions about their presence. The story (maybe true, maybe not) goes that Washington, an enslaver himself, spotted young Darby playing outdoors, ordered him inside, to ask for something to do. Darby—according to the story—asked Washington how much he would be paid for his work.

Folklore it might be (and probably is, TBH) but that story points to something that was true: The moment George Reed, Jr. died in the middle of the upheaval of the War for Independence, Darby Vassall, all of six years old, had understood that he was free, that he could go live with his real family, and have a normal life. He wasn’t about to have that freedom taken from him, and thanks to his parents’ brilliant maneuvers through the upheaval of wartime, he did not.

The black Vassall family farmed the land attached to the house, which did not provoke any suspicion. Darby’s father, Anthony (Tony) Vassall, simply told the local authorities, who had confiscated the house when the white Vassalls left, and rented it to Washington, that he was a free man. He did not claim that his wife and kids were free, because he now made the clever argument that his family actually belonged to the local government, who would have to feed and clothe them. So he offered to take over that irksome responsibility as family patriarch, if the government would compensate him for his trouble. A government official bought his argument, and gave Tony the astonishing sum of £222.

Tony went further, repeatedly petitioning the Massachusetts state legislature for title to the land that had been abandoned by the white Vassalls, and which the black Vassalls had improved by farming, so gaining a claim to ownership. That’s what they had been busy doing under Washington’s nose. Tony Vassall framed his claims for more support not as pleas for charity, but pointing out that although he and his wife, Cuba, were “dwelling in a land of freedom”, they had spent a total of sixty years enslaved. He was, in short, demanding reparations, and pointing to how the new United States was framing itself as a land of liberty.

The legislature did not give Tony Vassall land title, but they did promise him twenty-four pounds a year. That meant that even when the Vassall estate was sold and the family evicted in 1781, Anthony Vassall could now afford to buy a good house, to which he added several acres of land over the next several years. He had been coachman to the white Vassalls, so he had the skills of a farrier, and took up shoeing, grooming, and boarding horses, on his own property, along with farming.

Anthony and Cuba Vassall were now a respectable family. And that’s how Darby Vassall grew up learning his father’s trade as a farrier and as a farmer, as well as living in a furnished house, and sleeping on a feather bed. That’s also how he entered adult life with a little insurance in the form of family wealth.

By 1806, Darby was married to Lucy, with five children, and living in Boston in his own house. He was a leader and advocate for Boston’s Black community, and during the Haitian Revolution, he raised a toast to a future day “when the color of man shall no longer be a pretext for depriving him of his liberty.” Years later, Darby Vassall led Boston’s black citizens’ opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act, which enabled Southern enslavers and their hired goons to kidnap any and all black people off the streets of Northern cities based on often made-up claims to their being someone’s property.

For all his efforts, Darby Vassall, former brave little kid who walked from slavery to home, became affectionately known to Black Bostonians as Daddy Vassall. What became of him in his old age is also a compelling story, and a great reason to get yourself a copy of Dr. Whiting’s book!

If this post has caught your attention, I highly recommend Gloria McCahon Whiting’s Belonging as a highly readable work of academic history, crammed full of stories about slavery and enslaved people in the very different (or maybe not so different?) culture and society of early New England.

I’ve written about slavery in New England before at NBH, riffing on Dr. T.H. Breen’s great essay on the subject. This is one of hundreds of posts available to subscribers to Non-Boring History.

My name’s Annette Laing, I hold a PhD in early American and modern British history, I quit my job as a tenured professor back in 2008, and, after many years of writing the Snipesville series of time-travel novels, and entertaining and engaging thousands of kids, teens, teachers, and families with actual history, I now write Non-Boring History for you! Readers’ support for my unique mission is essential to my work, and I continue to need more readers to step up. When you become a subscriber (annual, monthly, or patron) You get a guarantee that you’re on the mailing list, and a whole world of NBH.

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Today's post is a great example of why historians aren't invited to parties. You have been warned! Which is not to say that it's not entertaining: Scandal is a big theme, as is cul…

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Hello, and a special welcome to New Nonnies (paid subscribers)! I’m Annette Laing , PhD in American and British history, specialist in popular religious culture in 18th century America, former professor, Brit in the US, not a posh person, and, weirdly, author of the Snipesville series of time-travel novels for kids, teens, and adults wearing paper bags on their heads.

Non-Boring History (established 2021) is my newest venture. It’s where I grab the public by the ear with wit and charm, and sneakily lure you into the gobsmacking world of academic history! Today’s post is free, but I do need more readers to support (and I do reward your support!). So (cough) if you have been enjoying NBH for quite awhile without doing your bit, and wouldn’t balk at spending money on a beer or a coffee, let me assure you that Non-Boring History membership is actually cheaper and healthier than buying either of those things once a month. Ooh, look, a convenient red button!

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Today, I’m starting with this truly crappy photo, for which I apologize. My other photos were better, except my family members photobombed them, so this is what we’re left with:

I get that we can’t tell from this photo that the bed is big. But, I promise, it's big. The biggest. Huuuuuge. A big perfect bed like nobody has ever seen in the history of the world.

That said . . . Nobody famous owned this big bed. Nobody famous slept in this big bed. Which begs the question:

What is this ridiculously big bed doing in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (fondly known as the V&A)? Why would this distinguished museum of decorative art make room for a battered, graffitied bed of massiveness?

And why am I writing about this?

This is, no question, a very big bed. In fact, it was even bigger until someone cut it shorter in the 19th century. Today, the bed is still almost ten feet across, while the largest standard American bed, the California King, is six feet across. Okay, not thrilling, but still pretty darn big. Allegedly, this bed could sleep up to four couples. Which, when you think about it, is a somewhat titillating claim. What were they all doing in bed together?

Okay, Laing, we get that the bed is big. What else you got?

This bed is not only very big: It's also very old. It dates to the late 16th century, to 1590 to be exact. And where was this formidable bit of furniture first found? In a royal palace, perhaps?

Nope. The bed was originally made for a pub in the town of Ware. And that's how it got its name: The Great Bed of Ware.

Ware? Where’s that?

Exactly! Ware is not exciting. It is an unremarkable town in Hertfordshire, the little county north of London. I grew up in Hertfordshire, and I have never been to Ware, nor did anyone suggest I should visit. Says it all.

But here's one clue to why the Great Bed of Ware is not just a big bed, but an amazing bed. Indeed, the Victoria and Albert Museum describes the bed as “one of the V&A's greatest treasures”.

No, it's not just big

The V&A Museum says the Great Bed of Ware is important because, well, it’s big.

No, seriously. I’ll quote you their website:

The spectacular four-poster bed is famously over three metres wide – the only known example of a bed of this size, and reputedly able to accommodate at least four couples!

Look at that exclamation mark! Look at their little art historian hearts flutter! This historian yawns. That’s nice, my arty-farty friends, I say. Whatevs. Anyway, I don't think you're thinking right about the Great Bed. Typically, or ever, it wasn't full of mixed-sex couples, as you imply, but of unrelated and probably unacquainted men.

Wow. Tell us more!

No, no, don't get too excited. Sharing a bed in an inn (men only) was normal in centuries past, just as being expected to share cafe tables with strangers was long normal in the UK, but let's not give Hilton or Marriott any ideas, ok?

So there’s an interesting fact (yes, privacy is a pretty new idea). But I did wonder why people still find the Great Bed so interesting. While in London, I ran a scientific* test of the Great Bed’s interest value to museum visitors.

*The Quality Control Gnome at Non-Boring House strongly objected to my use of “scientific”. I pointed out that since so many scientists have remained silent in the face of bizarre ideas taking hold among the public in the last few years, and how many non-PhDs are shamefully claiming to be historians, I might as well call myself a scientist! The Quality Control Gnome wants you to know that I'm describing myself as “scientific” over his strongest objections, but then he always has held himself to the highest standards of integrity, which makes him quite the novelty these days. Come to think of it, I’m lucky to have him.

Anyway, in the interests of “scientific” enquiry, ahem, I met my adult son Hoosen, Jr. and his girlfriend at the V&A (for lo, they were in London at the same time, and kindly consented to be seen with me). I promised them scones and tea in the V&A cafe if they would allow me to show them a mystery object at the museum.

I led this obliging young couple through the halls of the V&A, past many fascinating objects. Finally, I presented them to the bed, declaring “Behold, the Great Bed of Ware!”

These polite young people agreed that the bed was big. And then they looked baffled. I suddenly felt that I might have, er, embarrassed them. Oh, dear. Oops. I explained that this is probably my favorite object in the whole massive museum.

So then I told them the story about the bed that I think the V&A really needs to spotlight. It's not just a big bed.

To be fair, the V&A does mention the bed's primary purpose in its info materials. But most of what they have to say about it is either stating the bleeding obvious (it’s a big bed!) or rambling on about the woods used to build it, the exact dimensions, the design, etc. Boring.

Here’s what is interesting about the Great Bed of Ware: It was a tourist attraction in Shakespeare’s day, and it has been ever since. I could stop there, but you don’t come to Non-Boring History for clickbait or trivia. And if you have popped in just for that, then pull yourself together, pour yourself a nice cup of tea or coffee, settle into a comfy chair. Now, let me remind you today of the pleasures of those times before we all became semi-literate doomscrolling addicts, and lost our collective minds.

So. How could this bed have been a tourist attraction? I mean, the Ware Tourism Office lay far in the future. So far in the future, it hasn’t been invented yet. Friends, nobody goes on holiday to Ware. But for a long time, a lot of people passed through it on their way to more desirable destinations.

Ware’s the Attractions

After reading about Ware, I wonder: Maybe I should go there —maybe not for a holiday, but on behalf of my readers at Non-Boring History? I now learn that Ware is home to loads of old buildings, and among them, Roman remains, including of the human variety. The skeleton of a Roman teenager was discovered in Ware. She is disrespectfully nicknamed “Ermintrude” after a popular puppet on 1970s British kids’ TV.

Of course, we’re talking England, where you can chuck a rock and have an excellent chance of hitting something Roman. Ware needs to do better to lure the tourists in hordes. It always did need to do better.

Let us return to 1590, the (approximate) year that the Great Bed of Ware was born. Elizabeth I was Queen. Britain’s American empire amounted to two spectacularly failed colonies in Roanoke. Bill Shakespeare was showrunner to smash-hit productions with standing-room only paying crowds at London's Globe Theatre, where the paywalls were real.

At this time, Ware’s main (only?) claim to fame for travelers was that it was on the highway out of London that was then known as Old North Road.

The Old North Road is not as well known as the Great North Road, the other main route headed north from London that is today bypassed by the major route called the A1, mostly freeway. But the Old North Road is indeed older than its rival, having been a replacement for the Romans’ Ermine Street. And until it merged with the Great North Road, well north of Ware, the two routes had to compete for travelers.

Ware was, in short, a pit stop on a lesser main road. Californians can now imagine some tourist town on the 99 hoping to draw traffic from the I-5.

Every inn (hotel/pub/restaurant ) in Ware (where?) had to compete not only with establishments in other towns, but with its rivals in Ware to feed and lodge passing travelers, especially during the slow winter season.

Enter the Great Bed of Ware. It was, in American terms, a roadside attraction. Not a destination, as such, but a reason to stop, a reason to choose Ware’s White Hart Inn for your dining and accommodation needs going north! The White Hart Inn’s name? A hart is a male deer, unlike a female deer, cue Julie Andrews.

The owner of the White Hart Inn commissioned this massive bit of bedroom furniture from a local carpenter around 1590. Imagine the conversation between craftsman and his innkeeper customer:

Sorry, how big did you say you want this bed? What? You're pulling my leg, aren't you, sir?

The bed’s purpose? To give the White Hart an edge over its neighboring rival hotels in Ware, and yes, beyond. Come see the world’s biggest bed, folks! Better, come sleep in it! Only in Ware! Well worth the detour!

And if you did stay the night in this humongous bed? You could scratch your name on the bedposts, or leave a wax seal (provided, at cost I will guess, by the inn) to show the world that you, yes, you had slept there! Hey, that was the nearest thing to Instagram in 1590.

A brilliant bit of hotel marketing. That’s what the Great Bed of Ware was.

And it had an impact that echoes to the present day, and perhaps especially in America.

The Great Bed of Ware is an ancestor of South Carolina’s hilarious South of the Border tourist trap. It's a root of the novelty hotels on “iconic” Route 66, which I wrote about here at Non-Boring History. Nonnies (paying subscribers) unlock more than 650 fresh and tasty posts like these:

And more recently, the Great Bed of Ware’s creativity eventually helped lead to therevived 1950s motels I've been reporting on in Road posts at NBH, everywhere from Monterey on the northern California coast, to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, to Roanoke, Virginia. These motels’ owners have spruced them up, and colorfully themed them, to provide eccentric alternatives, in small towns on scenic backroads, to the very boring (and increasingly shabby and poorly run) chain hotels on the nation’s freeways.

But the Great Bed of Ware has a claim that no modern hotel attraction will ever be able to make: It was mentioned in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.* You don’t get better advertising than that in 1601!

*Sir Toby Belch urges his drinking buddy Sir Andrew Aguecheek to write a forceful letter to the servant with whom he's competing for the attentions of Sir Toby’s niece:

“Taunt him with the license of ink. If thou “thou”-est him some thrice, it shall not be amiss, and as many lies as will lie in thy sheet of paper, although the sheet were big enough for the bed of Ware in England, set ’em down. Go, about it. Let there be gall enough in thy ink, though thou write with a goose-pen, no matter.”

From Tourist Trap to Art

How did the Great Bed of Ware get from the White Hart Inn to the Victoria and Albert Museum? The bed took quite the journey of its own.

The White Hart, having apparently moved onto a new marketing campaign after a couple of hundred years of bed-centered promotions, eventually sold the bed to a neighboring Ware inn, the Saracen’s Head.

The Saracen’s Head’s owners, recognizing that the bed was now very old indeed, eventually offered it to the new V&A Museum in the mid-19th century, in the year the American Civil War ended.

But in 1865, the V&A snottily turned down the Great Bed of Ware as “a coarse and mutilated relic” and not “appropriate” to its fancy new museum.

(Seriously. I had no idea until now that snotty people had weaponized the word “appropriate” so long ago. Fascinating.)

Five years later, in 1870, the Saracen’s Head finally sold the Great Bed to a local landowner in Ware, who made it an attraction in his new Pleasure Garden. Pleasure Gardens were the ancestors of theme parks. This was a park with built-in attractions and entertainments. Like an enormous bed.

Here the bed stayed, until 1931, when the V&A, under the management of a new generation, finally saw its value as a decorative arts object (it’s old! it’s big!) and gave it a new home.

My job is to persuade everyone to think about history, not just art history. As a trained historian, I know objects are far more interesting to the public when they have stories attached to them.

That's why I think the museum needs to celebrate the Great Bed of Ware for what it really was in its own day. It was a very clever, creative, and successful marketing gimmick. And it still has lessons for tourism entrepreneurs today, hundreds of years later: If you build it, they will come.

The Great Bed of Ware in Rhyme!

We have an extraordinarily talented bunch of Nonnies (paying NBH supporters, bless, because writers cannot live on free subscriptions and vague goodwill). One such is SuperNonnie (NBH patron) Dr. Julia Griffin.

SuperNonnie Julia recently retired as Professor of English at Georgia Southern University. She’s a Brit, and an Oxford- (and Cambridge!) educated expert on 17th century author and dead poet John Milton.

Look at the posh company you keep when you're a Nonnie!

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I know Julia best as a wonderfully good-humored, kind, and (obviously) generous soul. She is also an accomplished poet in her own right, but her work is of a very different sort from that of her beloved Milton.

Julia is an award-winning published poet, a writer of light verse. Light verse is best described as the kind of poetry we can all actually enjoy!

And here’s Julia’s take on the Great Bed of Ware. She clearly has more appreciation for its artistic beauty than does Laing, the stodgy historian. Julia does a wonderful job of imagining what it must have been like to share this giant bed with strangers. Like every hotel bed of its time, unless reserved for the rare traveling lady or celebs, the Great Bed of Ware was shared among men, and usually strangers.

The Great Bed of Ware, by Julia Griffin

The Great Bed of Ware
Was as cosy as clean. 
No bed could compare – 
You had to be there: 
It slept seventeen, 
With a good inch to spare! 
It was pull-as-you-dare 
At the risk of a scene 
If the folk were unfair 
That you snuggled between, 
In your bid for a share 
Of that bolster of hair 
And that sturdy couvert 
Made of sailors’ sateen 
Such as no one could tear 
Or demote or demean 
On the Great Bed of Ware – 
O you had to be there! – 
On the Great Bed of Ware,
Just as cosy as clean.

Before You Go . . .

The original version of this classic Annette on the Road post first appeared at Non-Boring History in July, 2023. Yes, I am happily working on brand new posts as you sip frosty drinks on the beach. Still languishing on the free list? New paid subscribers get the keys to browse the NBH Library of 650 fresh ‘n tasty posts, which can also be searched by keyword at your leisure, and much more besides!

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In my rush on Tuesday, I got confused. I thought this weekend was July 4th which, obviously, it isn’t, and I told you there would be no post today, which, obviously, this is. I could blame my goof on the Gnomes, but that would be cowardly and dishonest, so, yeah, my bad. In short: Here I am!

As for July 4? I’m taking off this coming week, giving me catch-up time to work on NBH posts and Ye Dreaded Book. Don't feel you're missing out: For you as a Nonnie, the entire collection of more than 650 NBH posts is open for browsing whenever you like, another great way to enjoy NBH.

And now . . .

My Odes to Joy

You're not imagining things: Joy turned into a bit of a theme at Non-Boring House in the past week or so. On Tuesday, I wrote about a gay couple who turned derelict miners’ cottages and Cornish pasties into theatre in a small Midwestern town. This was decades before TV cook Julia Child introduced America to French food, and the gay liberation movement became a thing. And the guys launched their cheerful project during the Great Depression.

Meet Bob Neal, Edgar Hellum, and the magical world of Pendarvis:

I know it must seem insane of me to write about Cornish pasties, two theatrical pasty-baking blokes in Wisconsin, and Scottish comedian Will Fyffe (as I also did last week). Aren't I supposed to be a historian? Don’t I have more important, more serious things to write about for you?

Writing about song, dance, and joy may not be as whimsical as it looks. We don’t often think of the past as a happy place, do we? Of course, it often wasn’t, just like the present. But history is at least as much about people doing things as it is about people having things done to them. The stories that many historians—including me— love the most are those that show ordinary people taking an active leading role, as individuals and groups, and often without even meaning to. And that includes reviving joy.

I mean, look at all the Scots who just cheered up Boston! Tragedy and disaster happen, of course, but agency—taking action— rather than victimhood defines human history. And all through the past, community and even joy happen amid stress and sorrow.

Joy isn’t just distraction from serious issues or selfish indulgence in hard times. Joy is the best part of life. Joy recharges our batteries for dealing with life’s more rotten bits. How, I thought, have people without loads of money found joy in life in the past, even during hard times? Is there a history of happiness? I’m happy to say that the answer is yes! I’m putting the book I have in mind near the top of my reading pile so I can write about it for you. For historians, joy is serious stuff!

Meanwhile, thinking about joy, I thought of music. I realized this was a great moment to write about long-ago Scottish comedian (and my distant relative) Will Fyffe. His songs blended empathy, humor, and joy, especially during the Great Depression, and, developed b for a music hall (vaudeville) act, they encouraged singing along.

When it comes to Will Fyffe and joy, I especially think of The Belle O’the Ball, better known as Bonnie Wee Jeannie McColl. This song’s about a young man’s joy in meeting his true love at a wedding. Will Fyffe wrote it in 1929, right before the Great Depression. This song was perfect for its times, and it is still good now.

I know many of my readers don’t like to click on links, but there are some things I just cannot put into words, and music is one of them. I beg you: Please have a wee listen below.

Fyffe’s short song and his monologue, sandwiched in the middle, are both in Scots. Even if the words confuse you, I bet you enjoy Will’s cheery enthusiasm and Dundee dialect. The song is meant to be sung along with, so go for it if you’re in the mood, and just make up your own words if you like. That’s joy!

Bonnie Wee Jeannie McColl has just done the rounds among Scottish World Cup football fans with revised lyrics. Instead of “a nice wee lass, a fine wee lass” we get “a fine wee team, a bonnie wee team”. That’s what makes this a folk song, a song sung by people for their own pleasure, a song that people make their own. Any song can be a folk song!

Thinking “joy” “folk” and “Cornish” together got me humming a tune from an event believed to be among the oldest cultural celebrations in the UK. Then I thought of the joy this event inspired in a young spectator, an outsider. She in turn, wrote a song about that day, called The Floral Dance, which (with or without its words) became one of the most popular folk tunes in 20th century Britain, even experiencing a revival when it almost beat Paul McCartney to the top of the charts.

The Joy of Flora Day

Whether they’re having good times or bad, on one day every year, usually May 8, the people of the English town of Helston (population 11,000 or so) take to the streets.

Led by the local band playing the same simple but catchy tune over and over, the Helston’s people parade through their town, dancing in pairs, changing partners at regular intervals, even dancing through homes, shops, and offices.

Everyone gets to join in: The first dancers start at 7 a.m., many of them folk who need to be at work that day, women in cheerful flowery dresses, men in shirtsleeves and ties. About 9:30 a.m. the local children, more than a thousand of them, dance through the streets in white uniforms.

Then, at noon, comes the big event: Thousands of Helston people take to the streets in their finery, wedding hats and best frocks for the ladies, top hats and tails for the gents. Thousands more people, visitors as well as townsfolk, line the streets as spectators.

Finally, the last dance is at 5 p.m., the end of the workday, when the morning dancers return. And that concludes the annual Furry Dance, on Flora Day, in Helston. After that (I assume) all the adult dancers head to Helston’s pubs for more celebration of community

History of this event? A lot, I'm sure, but hard to know any of it. I can tell you Helston is in Cornwall, home to Cornish pasties, and the Cornish language, which is descended from the language spoken by ancient Britons, and related to modern Welsh and (more distantly) Scottish and Irish Gaelic. Declared dead in the 1970s, Cornish has since had a bit of a revival, with some people learning it as a second language. Otherwise, it survives in fragments. One of those fragments is in the name of the Furry Dance.

One day every year, the people of Helston dance the Furry Dance, and they have done so for centuries. “Furry” has nothing to do with people dressing in animal costumes, but may come from a Cornish word for festival, which makes sense. The dance is also known as the Flora dance, referring to spring.

Telling you it's a spring festival dance doesn't really do much to explain what this is about. Why do Helston people take one day every year to dance together? The official explanation is that Flora Day is a celebration of the Archangel Michael, Helston’s patron saint, but that doesn't tell us much, either. Is Flora Day an example of the medieval church’s co-opting an ancient pagan rite of spring? Probably. Customs do not come down to us unchanged from an unchanging past: What we call tradition is almost always surprisingly recent. And in a modern secular England, which it has been for longer than you think, people need a better reason to keep up a tradition.

Flora Day is definitely a celebration of the town itself. Between dances in the morning, townspeople stage a historical pageant called Hal-an-Tow (nobody quite knows what that means), which tells its story in song.

How far pageant and song go back is also unknown. As is often the case in cultural history, clues can mislead us. A disparaging reference to Spaniards in the song might not be random, but refer to the attempted invasion of England by Spain in 1588, or a 1595 Spanish raid on a nearby town. A reference to Shakespeare was added no earlier than the mid-1950s. A mention of the Archangel Michael was added to the play only in the 1930s, and the most recent religious reference to a medieval Cornish bishop snuck in in 2005. This recent history shows that the song has changed, no surprise, but the very fact that Helston reminds itself every year that it has a past—no matter how dodgy the actual history described—is very cool.

Who knows when all of this started? Documents don't help much. A letter made a passing reference to Helston’s dance in the 1790s, and suggested it was old even then. But this custom belongs mostly to heritage, to people's ideas about the past, not documented history. This is why we talk about things dating back to “time immemorial”. That literally means before memory, or even the documents on which historians rely.

Most of all, Flora Day and the Furry Dance are a celebration of being together, of community. The marching bands’ music frequently prompts everyone to change partners as they parade through town. No doubt, everyone finds themselves dancing with people they don’t know, or do know and don’t like, so dancing is a great way to cement and repair community. Maybe they see and greet each other in town a few days later. Maybe they start a conversation. Maybe they plan a date.

The dance as it's practiced today also reveals community divisions. The early morning dance was reportedly introduced for servants who had to get to work. The noon dance was at some time reserved for the posh people—hence the top hats and tails. This ensured that the local gentry didn't have to dance with riff-raff.

I suspect this exclusive dance for the posh likely was not that old of a custom. Many old folk festivals were about “the world turned upside down”, with poor men as king for a day, or otherwise papering over class differences, rather than reinforcing them. And the top hats and tails certainly aren't old —very 19th century.

Today, the top hats and tails remain, but all the town’s adults are welcome to dance together at noon, and my guess is that the top hats are borrowed or rented. The town’s children are also involved these days, with a dance of their own in the morning, a custom started in the 20th century. Everyone wears a flower, a lily-of-the-valley, the symbol of Helston.

Flora Day is also about keeping up a sense of place. By the time the day is done, you know where you live. You know what the people look like, the streets, even the insides of a few homes and businesses.

This reminds me of the medieval custom of the beating of the bounds. Traditionally (whenever that was) boys were taken on a walk around the boundaries of their village, and whipped along the way to help them remember the invisible walls around their community. Over time, the whipping went away: As early as the mid-18th century, a writer in a village in the nearby county of Dorset noted that the poor wee souls were slipped a half-penny coin to make them feel better after they were beaten.

Today, beating of the bounds is still observed in some villages and towns in England, including Cornwall, only now the kids (girls, too) are handed sticks with which to hit the boundaries themselves, not each other. Why do this strange thing at all? These are reminders of community, of a sense of place. This custom was on the books, sort of, in America, in parts of early New England, applied only to local politicians strolling the boundaries, without whipping (pity). Even so, like so many such customs in America, so large, so diverse, and always on the move, it has faded away.

The Band Plays On

Even as times and places and people have changed in so many ways, modern recording tech show us how the music and dance on Flora Day in Helston have stayed largely the same over the past century plus.

Here’s 1921, three years after the end of the First World War. The film was made a few years before sound came to movies, but the dancing is clearly on show, and it really hasn't changed much. I cued the film to a cool bit for you:

There had been change, though: There always is. I wonder if there was any shortage of male dancers after the First World War took three-quarters of a million British men? The children’s dance was added in 1922, Dress and hat styles changed to reflect flapper fashion.

Here’s the joy and pride of the Furry Dance thirty-five years later in glorious color, in an increasingly prosperous Helston (and Britain) still recovering from World War II, in 1955:

And finally, here’s Helston in May, 2026, a time in which Brits yearn to be cheered up. I'm struck by changing bodies, just starting to be understood as the product of the over- processed modern diet:

There are similar customs in some towns and villages in Cornwall, and elsewhere in England, joyous community events still hanging on in an age of miserable isolation. Hard not to see them as part of the remedy to what ails us. Well, that, and people getting out more in general.

From Flora to Floral

How did news of this local tradition and tune go national? That’s a story of 20th century Britain, of vacation travel, of recorded music, and of the never-ending human yearning for joy.

In 1911, just three years before British joy and optimism were blasted to smithereens in the trenches of France, professional singer and musician (not supermodel) Katie Moss took the train from London down to Cornwall for a holiday. She stayed in Helston, where she witnessed Flora Day. She was enthralled.

On the way back to London on the train, a besotted Moss started writing the music and words for a song based on the simple tune for the Furry Dance that's played by the Helston Band. She named her song The Floral Dance (maybe she didn’t know its real name, maybe this was deliberate to avoid confusion, no idea).

The first recording of Katie Moss’s song was made in 1912. Her music is sublime, but put together with her lyrics, the song captures the singer’s excitement, yearning to join the community of dancers, and joy when she (or he) does. For any musicians or singers out there who want to give the Floral Dance a go, here’s the original sheet music, including gender variations.

The Floral Dance

5.7MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Here’s one version of the words:

As I walked home on a summer's night,
When stars in heaven were shining bright
Far away from the footlights' glare
Into the sweet and scented air
Of a quaint old Cornish town
Borne from afar on the gentle breeze
Joining the murmur of summer seas
Distant tones of an old world dance
Played by a village band perchance,
On the calm air came floating down.

I thought I could hear the curious tone
Of cornet, clarinet and big trombone,
Fiddle, cello, big bass drum,
Bassoon, flute and euphonium,
Far away as in a trance
I heard the sound of the floral dance.

And soon I heard all the bustling and prancing,
And then I saw the whole village was dancing,
In and out of the houses they came,
Old folk, young folk all the same,
In that quaint old Cornish town.
Every boy took a girl by the waist
And hurried her off with tremendous haste,
Whether they knew one another I care not,
Whether they cared at all I know not,
But they kissed as they danced along.

And there was the band with the curious tone
Of the cornet, clarinet and big trombone,
Fiddle, cello, big bass drum,
Bassoon, flute and euphonium
Each one making the most of his chance,
All together in the floral dance.

I felt so lonely standing there,
That I could only stand and stare,
For I had no maid with me,
Lonely I should have to be,
In that quaint old Cornish town.
When suddenly hastening down the lane
A figure I knew I saw quite plain
With out-stretched hands I rushed along
And carried her into that merry throng,
And fiddle and all went dancing down.

We danced to the band with the curious tone
Of the cornet, clarinet and big trombone,
Fiddle, cello, big bass drum,
Bassoon, flute and euphonium,
Each one making the most of his chance,
All together in the floral dance.

Dancing here, dancing there,
Jigging, jogging, everywhere,
Up and down and around the town,
Hurrah for the Cornish floral dance!

That’s the version from my absolute favorite recording of Katie Moss’s song, which was produced by His Master’s Voice (HMV) Records in 1934. This explains why the guys in the photo below are awkwardly posed with a little dog staring into the horn of a record player, a living rendition of the HMV logo.

The Floral Dance was sung by the guy on the left, popular bass-baritone Peter Dawson (1882-1961), born in Australia to immigrant Scots, resident in London for many years, and one of the world’s first recording superstars.

Age and looks were no barrier to musical success in the 1930s: Music and personality were the keys to popularity. We can hear Dawson’s Aussie accent break through occasionally in song, as in how he pronounces “bass”. Dawson was classically trained, but he didn't like opera, so he turned to singing popular music instead.

While Peter Dawson’s singing style, once normal, seems odd to us, associated with classical music rather than pop, Dawson's enthusiasm in channeling Katie Moss’s joy remains infectious. He’s absolutely worth listening to with an open mind and ear, through the crackles of an early 78 record from nearly a century ago:

Forty years later, in the height of the era of rock and roll, the Floral Dance (instrumental version) was an unexpected hit for the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band from Yorkshire, in the North of England. Brass bands were founded throughout that region in the 19th century, by working-class communities (often in mining villages) as a channel for joy in a hard life. This was the theme of the movie Brassed Off, which I highly recommend.

The Floral Dance recording was intended as a band fundraiser. But DJ Terry Wogan, a wildly popular Irishman in Britain, promoted the record on his radio show, and reminded everyone that the Floral Dance was a song, too. Speaking of joy, Terry Wogan brought a lot of it to Brits.

That's how The Floral Dance, written in 1911 and based on a very old tune, ended up the second best-selling record in Britain for six weeks, cheated of the #1 spot only by Paul McCartney’s Mull of Kintyre, which heavily featured bagpipes. These were both very unlikely smash hits in 1977.

The Brighouse and Rastrick Band came down to London and played The Floral Dance on Top of The Pops, the long-running BBC show featuring hit music with live performances, and an audience of dancing teenagers. The kids happily bopped along to the brass band, and why wouldn’t they? We young ‘uns had all bought the record, and for one moment in that year of punk rock and the Sex Pistols, our adults got to hope we weren't a lost generation. I wouldn't listen to the Sex Pistols now if you paid me, but I am happy to still listen to this:

Leap forward a half-century, to just a few weeks ago in 2026, and here’s The Floral Dance carrying on in faraway Queensland, Australia, played by the Townsville Brass Band:

Last but not least, let's step back ten years, and check out the entire audience in London’s Royal Albert Hall (about 6,000 people) singing the chorus to the Floral Dance with lead singers, band, and choir, thanks to helpful lyrics on a screen. Brits still love to sing together—and by Brits, I do mean England, Scotland, and Wales, even if they’re always threatening divorce.

Hurrah for the Cornish Floral Dance, indeed! (And for the late Terry Wogan, too)

Good luck getting that tune out of your head. But no apologies: I hope you find yourself humming and singing this ode to joy, or another song of your choice, and share it with others. I just moved the paywall so everything is visible, after I sent it to you, so you can do just that.

This week of all weeks, Americans are meeting millions of football fans traveling America, delighted by your country, and most of all, delighted to meet you. I invite Americans to remember the Declaration of Independence, to think of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, of joy.

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Lunch at Pendarvis House

The year is 1959. You and three friends are seated in a tiny restaurant in an ancient, low-ceilinged cottage in the scenic English county of Cornwall. China plates and cups hang on the whitewashed walls. Vases of freshly-cut wildflowers rest on the sideboard and on your table, which is covered in red check cloth.

Okay, the red check tablecloth is a tiny clue that you're actually not in Cornwall. The building is only a hundred and twenty years old, but that's old for these parts. You're at Pendarvis House, a Cornish-themed restaurant on the edge of the small town of Mineral Point in rural Wisconsin, USA. (Map time! 😀)

You're having an adventure today! To enjoy a meal here, you made an advance reservation for 1 p.m. lunch. You were lucky to get a booking, because this eatery is nationally known. You even had to reserve the specialty of the house for your group. You picked up your friends—all warned to be ready to go—and you hit the road early.

Driving all the way from Milwaukee, you prayed you were making good time. You knew that if you were late, you would go hungry: Pendarvis House rules are strict. As you drew closer to the small town of Mineral Point, you started to panic, put your foot on the gas, and arrived at 12:59 p.m. You didn’t have time for a personal tour of the house or the gardens, but at least you didn't miss lunch.

Now you’re here, you can relax. The moment you're seated, a balding and bespectacled older man with a trim mustache, in a suit and tie, emerges from the kitchen, and heads toward your table. He’s carrying an oval platter. Your anticipation rises. With great ceremony, he partly rests the platter on your table, balancing it on his fingertips, to show you and your friends an enormous pie. He says with great dignity, “This is your pasty. It was made especially for your party.”

British readers: Wait. Did he just say pasty? Like Cornish pasties, the cheap and cheerful pies made with beef, potatoes, onions, and turnips?

Yup. Cornish pasties. American-sized for sharing. Not exactly fine dining, is it? But this was the 1950s, before celebrity chefs and foodie culture. This was an America of meat and potatoes, in which pizza and burritos and Chinese stir-fry were still exotic ethnic and regional dishes to most of America. So was the Cornish pasty.

Back in the 1930s, people had got creative when the Great Depression hit, opening their front parlors to bring in extra income, feeding strangers familiar homemade foods at reasonable prices. (I don't know about you, but, being a Scot, selling homebaked goods is my Plan B if the economy sinks. Watch out for me plugging my baking throughout this post.)

After WWII, a booming America saw Americans jumping in their new cars every chance they got, clamoring for tasty road food made with familiar ingredients, and entertaining experiences. This little restaurant hit the spot. By the late 1950s, Pendarvis House was praised by a major national magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, as one of America’s seven best restaurants. It might even be America's very first destination restaurant, drawing eager foodies from as far as Chicago to the western Wisconsin countryside. Yes, for pasties. Good Lord.

Cornishness?

Welcome to Pendarvis, the magical and imaginative world created by Robert Neal and Edgar Hellum, both born in Wisconsin in 1906. This story is about a gay couple serving tasty food with love, on the stage they made, a tiny kingdom of restored century-old miners’ cottages, forming community and bringing joy.

Pasties are all over this part of America. A day’s drive from Non-Boring House there are pasty joints galore in the neighboring state of Michigan. Why? Immigrant miners from Cornwall, England, settled in 19th century Michigan in droves. And Cornish miners and pasties made an appearance here in Wisconsin, too, here in what became known as Mineral Point.

Let’s be clear: Pasties are personal-sized pies, not the naughty boob thingies pronounced paste-ees. The Cornish, like miners and farmworkers throughout Britain, needed a practical portable lunch to take to work. Sturdy pies hit the spot. In Cornwall, these pies took the form of Cornish pasties, pronounced with a short “a”, pass-tees in American English, which were crimped on the side (one of the things that distinguishes them from Welsh oggies, Bedfordshire clangers, Scottish Forfar bridies, and comparable regional pie thingies). These tasty turnovers were made from root vegetables and (when available) beef, baked in tough pastry crusts to survive the journey underground in miners’ pockets, and stay warm for as long as possible.

As advance advertising for my front-room restaurant should I not get more of my free readers to cough up for Non-Boring History (hint) here are the very-not-traditional pasties I made last week, with light crust around chicken and leek filling, and jolly good they were too:

Cornish miners and Cornish pasties emigrated together in the early 19th century, as Cornwall’s tin and copper industries collapsed in the face of foreign competition. The miners took their skills all over America, digging up everything from coal to arsenic to gold, leaving a trail of miners’ bodies, proud descendants, and pasty recipes. They came to Wisconsin to mine lead.

Native people, the Ho Chunk, Sauk, and Meskwaki (Fox) tribes, had long mined lead for their own needs. But in 1827, several years before the US government greenlighted non-Native invasion, profiteers were arriving here, in search of wealth from ruthlessly exploiting natural resources. Soon, with US government cooperation, Native people were forced from their land and lead mines, replaced by lead mining for sale and profit. Among the new mineowners? Henry Dodge, Missouri slaveowner who, once he helped crush Indian resistance to invasion as a colonel in the US Army during the Black Hawk War in the 1830s, became the first governor of the new territory (i.e. prospective state) of Wisconsin, appointed by his mate President Andrew Jackson. Jackson, in the 1830s, also greenlighted Native people being mass-deported from the southeast US, places like Georgia and Alabama, to what’s now Oklahoma, so non-Natives could take over their land and mineral rights. Lovely.

Cornish miners arrived in the 1830s just looking for work. I came to Mineral Point hoping to learn interesting stories of individual Cornish people who once lived here. That didn't happen. But what I learned was actually much more interesting.

I’ve written at NBH about how miners in Wisconsin became known as badgers, and how they are still a part of Wisconsin identity:

Pendarvis Today

Pendarvis today is a museum centered on six buildings on the edge of Mineral Point, Wisconsin. Bob Neal and Edgar Hellum restored these starting in the mid-1930s. They gave every building a distinctively Cornish name, like Polperro, Trelawny, and Pendarvis, also the name given to the site as a whole.

“Restoration” is a subject that doesn’t exactly thrill me. Most historical “restorations” of buildings have resulted in romanticized prettified stuff that doesn’t represent the actual past. As for people, my main interest? Pendarvis today does little to conjure up individual Cornish lives. But it does do much to explain how a gay couple survived and thrived in rural Wisconsin long before the gay rights movement. Now, that's interesting.

Pendarvis tells how Bob Neal and Edgar Hellum wove together community, imagination, and hospitality. As a restaurant story, it also appeals to my inner imaginary cafe proprietor, one who cares more for quality of food and life than for “marketing a concept”.

A Lunchless Visit to Pendarvis

Hoosen and I were alone in the Pendarvis Visitor Center. I was just congratulating myself on brilliantly booking an afternoon tour on a weekday, when the door opened, and in poured a large family from nearby Iowa. We were all directed next door to what I’ll call the orientation cottage, with photos and text on the walls, and life-size cut-outs of Bob and Edgar smiling knowingly at us.

I immediately wondered how the Iowa family would deal with the museum’s LGBTQ angle. I knew that a couple of Google reviews had grumbled about gay history in the tour, and complained that they had expected to learn about Cornish heritage, only to have to listen to the story of a gay couple who did restoration.

The obvious explanation for this is homophobia, but the full story is seldom obvious. There is mission confusion at this museum. The last thing it's about is what people are led to expect at the website, Cornish miners, with Bob and Edgar in the background. Yet here we were, and what’s the first thing we see?

Our young tour guide arrived, clearly new and nervous, clutching her cue cards as though her life depended on them. But she soon hit her stride, and was genuinely friendly and enthusiastic.

I looked curiously at the backs of the heads in front of me. Had the Iowa family got the hint about Bob and Edgar yet? Or was I being snotty, assuming their views? I told myself off. I wasn’t going to presume they would be appalled when the penny dropped. Finally, it happened: The guide introduced Bob and Edgar as “business partners . . . . and partners in life, too.”

Now followed a moment of deafening silence. It was, as Brits say, a pregnant pause, as everyone absorbed this. And then the guide moved on, and nothing else was said, including nothing in her spiel that implied gayness, except, of course, for the elephant, um, lifesize Bob and Edgar in the room. But surely there was more to the gay angle? Wasn't there? Was there a gay community in 1930s Mineral Point? Wait, what happened to the Cornish miners?

What complicates matters (for me, anyway) is that Edgar, who survived Bob by some years, dying in 2000, was reluctant to identify as gay. No wonder, when he had lived through an era of massive homophobia, of the active persecution of gay men that led to the Stonewall Uprising in 1969, which triggered the gay rights movement the year before the couple retired and closed their restaurant.

I do not require the late Edgar Hellum to return from the dead, and explain his reasoning for staying in the closet. Identity is always a tricky thing, especially when we impose it on the dead. And, personally, I have had it up to here with our current identity obsession, including my own as a Brit or Scot, depending on my mood. I'm tired of any group identity being regarded as the defining characteristic of individuals. I know better. Everyone’s entitled to be themselves, not just a label.

So, whatever his reasons, I respect that Edgar Hellum was reluctant to focus on the couple’s handiwork as the work of two gay men. Rather, he wanted the emphasis to be on his and Bob Neal’s contribution to historic preservation, to saving the cottages, reminders of the Cornish roots of Mineral Point, and of Wisconsin. Bob seems to have agreed.

Unfortunately, historical preservation is not the most exciting story to lure in visitors. I'm not keen. I’m well aware that the twentieth-century idea of “preserving” buildings by romantically gussying them up (think Colonial Williamsburg) is no longer the goal of museum professionals. Historic preservation has a history of its own: It was most popular in a twentieth-century America that was sweeping away the past with freeways, urban sprawl, and sheer indifference.

Since 1970, when Bob and Edgar closed the restaurant, and retired, change has carried on at Pendarvis. Local retirees Bill and Evie Kitto acted as the Pendarvis museum caretakers for a decade, and Evie baked saffron cake for visitors. Today, no food is prepared at the museum. Gay marriage—unthinkable in Bob and Edgar’s day— is now legal, and these days, most hotels and restaurants are falling over themselves to advertise their LGBTQ-friendly hospitality. It’s long past time for the story of a gay couple who were determined to be themselves.

It’s time to focus on what Edgar wanted, the vision that he shared with Bob, and the gifts that they gave, like so many outsiders who give to communities, even while those communities withhold full acceptance—love— from them. I’m sure Bob and Edgar feared ostracism if their relationship was openly acknowledged in mid-century Mineral Point. However, Mineral Point handled the matter by labeling the men eccentrics. That’s the label that’s given to anyone a small town can’t quite cope with but kind of likes—been there. It probably helped that Bob was a native of Mineral Point.

Bob and Edgar, meanwhile, wanted to be seen as, well, Bob and Edgar. Their partnership was obvious to anyone who cared to see. And not just their working relationship, but also their love for each other, and their genuine care for their guests.

Shakerag?

The original Cornish miners in Mineral Point likely would not have recognized their cottages after Bob and Edgar returned them to life. The Cornish had arrived in Mineral Point in the 1830s, and they did not stay long. They often came without wives, which I guess meant they had to make their own darn pasties. They were likely a hardworking, hard-drinking, and quarrelsome lot. Their neighborhood across the street from the mine, which itself is now a park with trails and a swimming pool, became known as Shakerag.

Shakerag? The story that Bob and Edgar (and everyone locally) long told was that miners’ wives stood at their cottage doors, waving hankies to let their husbands know that lunch was ready. That makes no sense. Miners —working underground—were not likely sending up periscopes for signs of fluttering hankies, much less returning back to the surface for lunch. That's what pasties were for. This story was, in short, rubbish.

“Shakerag” actually meant “an unkempt, disreputable person” , someone poor, and the name was often applied to poor neighborhoods. Doesn’t that make a whole lot more sense? Regardless, Bob and Edgar changed the name of their street from Hoard Street to Shakerag Street. I can certainly see why.

Cornish miners didn't stick around long: Migration is much of the story of the United States. In 1849, they abandoned their cottages, and headed to California for the Gold Rush, likely hoping they could arrive in time to profit themselves, rather than enrich their employers.

Nearly a hundred years later, Edgar, a trained artist, hired employees at Pendarvis, to help with the renovation, Among the men he hired was a stonemason who had come from nearby Spring Green for a better employer. He had spent years toiling for an architect who had ripped him off for $1,700. That employer’s name? Frank Lloyd Wright. Trying to be surprised here. There’s a guy who didn’t hesitate to exploit people.

I wrote about my visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s home at NBH:

Authentically Baking a Living

Edgar Hellum and Bob Neal didn’t plan to bake pasties. Their original plan was to save the Cornish cottages in Mineral Point, and live in one of them. These were not poor men, but this was the Great Depression, and they needed an income. They opened an antiques shop at Pendarvis, but there wasn’t much demand for knickknacks and fancy furniture during the Great Depression.

One day in the mid-Thirties, Madison journalist Betty Cass happened to be in Mineral Point for an event, and she met Bob and Edgar. She asked about their restoration project, and they invited her in for tea and Bob’s sister’s saffron cake with her homemade plum jam. Betty Cass wrote about the charming experience in her column in the Wisconsin State Journal. She persuaded the lads to open a tearoom, and she kept writing about Pendarvis, every chance she got.

Look, in the 1930s, Bob Neal and Edgar Hellum could have served hot dogs, called them authentic Cornish food, and been believed. Okay, I exaggerate, but not by much. Yet the lads did not cheat or cut corners. They really, truly, took every effort to make everything properly Cornish. This is what words like authenticity and integrity mean.

For the tearoom and the food, the couple drew on culture vulture Bob’s stay in Cornwall. Bob’s sister gave them her recipes for Cornish saffron cake and plum jam. They served bread from a local bakery in Mineral Point, and fresh Wisconsin butter, along with what they called scalded cream, better known as clotted cream, from local cows. (No, you don't need to buy awful clotted cream in jars, friends. It's staggeringly easy to make. Here’s a recipe.) Later, as the menu at Pendarvis House expanded, the food remained local and homemade: That as normal in their day, before most restaurants served ingredients shipped in trucks, and even microwaved readymade meals.

Building Pendarvis

So the tearoom now paid Bob and Edgar's bills in summer. What could they do for income in winter? They hit on a plan. They sent a postcard to every guest who had signed the Pendarvis House visitor book (people left their names and addresses in those days). Their postcard advertised Christmas gifts from Pendarvis House, including the big-ticket “Cornish tea box”, featuring two pots of jam, a saffron cake, “and a package of our special tea”, which cost $2.85 plus postage.

Given that a pound of, say, sugar cost only about five cents in 1938, the Pendarvis House Cornish tea box was definitely a luxury gift with a hefty profit margin. Expensive mail-ordered edible Christmas gifts were a thing by now, as people came to believe that if food comes in the mail, it must be worth an arm and a leg. This was around the time that brothers Harry and David Rosenberg started shipping fruit from their Oregon orchards as “The Fruit of the Month Club”. Hard times in the Depression spawned much small-scale entrepreneurial ingenuity.

Meanwhile, building continued. Bob and Edgar bought the house next door. This two-story dwelling was built by a non-Cornish Englishman in the middle of the 19th century. The guide told us that this original owner was rich and had owned slaves. This had to be a mineowner. Who knew that Wisconsin, a stalwart state fighting for the Union and opposing slavery in the Civil War, had so many Southerners there at the start? Not me.

Bob and Edgar temporarily lived in this unrestored house, calling it Polperro, another Cornish name. Meanwhile, they restored the house on the other side of Pendarvis House. That would become Trelawny, their permanent home, while Polperro would house their antiques business and their mining museum, open to the public.

Around their rising empire of restored buildings, Bob and Edgar also designed and built gardens and a lovely courtyard, incorporating the natural limestone cliffs and a little cave behind Pendarvis House. Here in the courtyard, in fine weather, diners sat and chatted as they waited for their tables. Soon the food was more substantial than tea with saffron cake and bread and jam. It became even more Cornish.

The Legend of Pendarvis

As customers continued to flock to Pendarvis, Bob and Edgar began offering a full Cornish meal. Only nine tables fit in Pendarvis House, but limited bookings only made a meal seem that much more exclusive, a sought-after treat.

The menu’s showstopper was a giant Cornish pasty, one per table, from a recipe developed by Bob’s sister, and cooked by Bob. The megapasty wasn’t the only choice: When you made a reservation, you could request another specialty if you preferred, like an individual Cornish Veal and Parsley Pie. For most guests, though, a shared Cornish pasty was the must-eat menu item.

Typically, you and your dining companions started with your personally-cooked-by-Bob giant pasty, accompanied by pickles, plus a homemade chili sauce. Bob and Edgar made this sauce with tomatoes and onions in season. They did so in the restaurant’s tiny back kitchen, in a baby’s bathtub, the biggest enamel bowl they could buy, and preserved the sauce in quart glass jars.

This main pasty course was followed by a salad course, and then by dessert, with Cornish saffron cake the specialty. In the kitchen, Bob, the pasty baker, wore a floppy chef’s hat and waist apron over his suit, to complete that cheffy aura. Yet he knew very well he was no chef, just a good home cook. At least once in writing, he admitted that his pasties were peasant food. Not that the guys hesitated to charge an arm and a leg for the meal.

After all, it wasn’t just the pasties people were paying for, right? The value was in the whole experience: The pretty and whimsical setting, the charm, the hospitality of two attentive hosts, and the story that they wove, highlighted by Bob, your chef, graciously presenting your pasty to your table as though it were a fine delicacy, not just Cornish fast food, a hamburger almost, chopped beef, potatoes, and onions folded in a crust. In Bob’s hands, a pasty was a personal gift, presented with his care and love. All you had to do was show up on time. If you were late? He took it personally. No pasty for you.

The food was tasty. Even Duncan Hines said so. You thought Duncan Hines was a cake mix? Nope, he was a person first. In 1956, Bob and Edgar were horrified to learn that Pendarvis was featured in a new book—indeed, a new kind of book, written for the age of the automobile. Author Duncan Hines was a salesman who traveled by car, and was at the mercy of whatever eateries he could find on the road, with no reviews to give him a clue.

Hines began keeping notes on the restaurants he liked. Friends persuaded him to publish his recommendations, in a book entitled Adventures in Good Eating. One of his favorites was Pendarvis House.

Bob and Edgar did not want the masses descending on their doorstep, and especially not without reservations. They wrote to Hines, asking him to remove Pendarvis from future editions. Instead, the author turned up in Mineral Point, to have lunch, and ask them what the matter was. They were serving excellent homecooked food, from pasty to clotted cream, jam, and saffron cake. Edgar and Bob were even growing their own vegetables on their property. “You’re the last one I want to take out,” Hines explained, according to Edgar. “You’re the real adventure in eating.” Pendarvis stayed in Duncan Hines’s book for many years.

Despite Bob and Edgar’s reluctance to be inundated with visitors, fame had its upside. Pendarvis’s reputation as a restaurant and historical restoration project helped the men expand their community far beyond Mineral Point. On one memorable day, Pendarvis hosted two famous novelists, Sinclair Lewis and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Rawlings gave Bob and Edgar money for a rose bush to mark her visit, which they duly bought and planted.

And then there was British historian A.L. Rowse. His name might not be familiar to you, but Bob and Edgar were thrilled to host him. A gay man, and a Cornishman himself, Rowse later wrote a pioneering history of homosexuality, in 1977. Was it a coincidence that A.L. Rowse visited this remote corner of Wisconsin? It seems unlikely. Which other gay visitors did Edgar and Bob host, I wondered, as personal friends or as patrons? Do we have any idea?

Certainly, Bob and Edgar hosted friends at the dining table in Polperro and then in Trelawny, and also in the private pub they built in the basement of a row of Cornish cottages around the corner. The pub is still there, and anyone can visit, but it is not open as a pub, except on special occasions. Hoosen and I agreed that the guys did a fantastic job of evoking an ancient British pub, based on photos and memories, and using local materials from Mineral Point. Bench seating was made from old church pews, and covered in leather from Bob’s uncle’s factory.

While Edgar, a trained artist, preferred construction, Bob was a trained interior designer. He loved the performing arts, and that had a huge impact, Edgar said in an interview, featured in On the Shake Rag, a slim book in the gift shop, from which I drew today,

“[Bob] liked the opera, he liked ballet, he liked what the city had to offer. He liked theater and that’s what our place got to be. It was like a theater. We set the stage, you see.”

Don't miss what Edgar said there: “It was like a theater. We set the stage, you see.”

Welcome to Pendarvis, a performance you will always remember. Bob and Edgar are delighted to meet you, host you, and feed you, you lucky few. They have no interest in entertaining the masses. They entertain their friends, and if they like you, they consider you a friend. Another restaurateur suggested to Bob and Edgar that they could make a fortune by selling to people sitting at picnic tables on the terrace. They dismissed the very idea. How could they form community if they simply aimed to profit from serving slop to the hungry hordes?

And if a party of diners was late? Their pasty was given away to local friends, starving artists who, drawn by Pendarvis, were now settling in Mineral Point. If you listen carefully to the few recorded words of Edgar Hellum, he tells you flat out what made Pendarvis a joy. “The whole secret is sharing,” he said in an interview.

“Certain little things that were unexpected, nice things that happened to both of us—it came indirectly from having been kind, or considerate, or generous.”

Pendarvis never was about making a fortune, or fame. Pendarvis wasn’t really about preserving an imagined Cornish past in America, either. Pendarvis was all about life, love, people, community, and tasty food, through a whimsical take on 20th century tourist Cornwall conjured up by two men who loved each other enough to live and work together for nearly forty years, until they retired in 1970. Then, sadly, they went their separate ways. [Update: I just read that they did remain friends, and that Edgar cared for Bob in his final two years. So a happy ending after all!]

Bob Neal and Edgar Hellum gave a gift to the small town in Wisconsin in which they lived for a long time, even though many in that town had kept them at arm’s length. Mineral Point is an attractive town, and it’s also an artists’ colony, for which it can thank Bob and Edgar. Their corner of Shakerag Street and Spruce Street anchors the town, and gives it something to talk about to visitors, other than pasties and miners. That’s a fascinating story from so many angles.

And as for American history? Look, and you will see it all around Pendarvis. Histories of tourism, restaurants, travel, of interest in “restoring” the past at a time when the American past was being swept away. Cars and good roads, the building of community, including gay community, and community between gay men and those who feared them. A perfect storm of so many of the things that made the 20th century the American Century.

I loved realizing the most touching aspects of the story at Pendarvis, because—confession— this connects with how I think of Non-Boring History, and everything else I do. After years of theatrically entertaining thousands of hungover college students with history, starting at 8 a.m., and then thousands of kids and adults in schools and museums, dressed in costume, I now write for the Nonnies, the readers I consider friends, who return my love with support for what I do. The goal never has been fame and fortune. All along, it’s been about the freedom to explore my interests: History, hospitality, people, and even theatre (the Associated Press once did a story on my use of immersive theatre to engage kids in history). Please allow me to serve you regular servings of heaping, tasty food for the brain. It’s good value!

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If you visit Mineral Point, you can still get a pasty lunch, just not at the museum! Hoosen ordered the pasty at the Pointer Cafe nearby, and very good it was, too, served just like Bob’s, as a slice with a mild chili sauce. It definitely had its own theatrical atmosphere:

Here’s my Cornish saffron bread. This is your saffron bread. It was baked especially for you. Help yourself! I made clotted cream to go with.

An earlier version of this post first appeared at Non-Boring History in June, 2022. Never miss Annette’s newest material when you’re a proper annual or monthly subscriber (and you get the pride and joy that comes from being a part of NBH)

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I'm technically taking today off, but I couldn't resist knocking out a quick post, not after watching my Scots countrymen, the Tartan Army, take over Boston this week for the Worl…

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Remembering Historians

“This is exciting,” I said to Hoosen. That might seem unlikely: We were driving through Oklahoma, and our destination was Tulsa. But I had my reasons. “Tulsa has a park named after John Hope Franklin. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a park named for a historian before.”

“Is that where he’s from?” Hoosen asked.

“I think so,” I said. When thinking of Dr. Franklin, “Tulsa” wasn't the first thing that sprang to my mind.

John Hope Franklin earned a PhD in history from Harvard in 1941, followed by a long life (he checked out at age 94) and a stellar career. Like the late historian Gordon S. Wood (see my Saturday post) , who graduated from Harvard in 1964, a generation later, Dr. Franklin had annoying encounters with his posh Harvard professor Samuel Eliot Morison.

Let's start there . Why not? I'm thinking historians this week, and Samuel Eliot Morison and John Hope Franklin were not an obvious fit. At all.

My post on Gordon Wood, and much more:

Annette’s Aside: Changing History, Changing Historians

History isn't just a bunch of names, dates, and whatnot. It's the study of change over time, and just like everything else, history changes, because it's written by people: Times change and historians change with them.

Nearly forty years ago, I read one of Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison’s books on the early exploration of the Americas. I nearly died from boredom— and that's saying a lot when we’re talking academic history. Dr. Morison and I had a tough time connecting because we were both people of our own places and times.

Born in 1887, Samuel Eliot Morison got his PhD in 1912, and later became a professor at Harvard, where, as a wealthy Bostonian, he naturally fit in. Born in the mid-1960s, I got my PhD during the Clinton administration, and became a professor at a party school in rural Georgia, where, as a British woman, I definitely did not fit in. Dr. Morison's historical interests changed across his lifetime, from early America to 20th century military history, as did mine, from British political history to early America, so we at least had that in common. Otherwise, we were about as unlike as historians could be.

Dr. Morison's time was already pretty much up by the time I suffered through his book as a graduate student in California in 1988. He would have turned 101 that year, had he not expired in 1976 at age 88. Morison’s work was long respected among historians (which is why I was stuck with reading him) and the American reading public. In 1988, I utterly failed to relate to his version of history. Times change. Historians change. History changes.

Morison was born in 1887, around the time that modern professional history was emerging as a university subject, which is why he could get away with being a scholar who could publish books on the founding of New England one minute, and World War II the next: The field was wide open. I only get that kind of flexibility because I quit academia, and write for you instead. Alas, my professor salary (pitiful though it was) did not follow me from Georgia.Hint.

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To his graduate students who were not wealthy New Englanders, Dr. Morison was—I’ll be kind about this— a right pain in the neck. He wasn’t outright hostile. It was worse than that: He was a well-meaning bumbling liberal, and his outsider history students at Harvard experienced his oblivious casual snobbery, racism, and antisemitism.

Samuel Eliot Morison was a bridge between Harvard history’s past— the posh New England historians who wrote about the early Puritans and basically did ancestor worship—and its future, represented by PhD students like Gordon S. Wood (a working-class white New Englander) and, even before him, John Hope Franklin. Franklin was hardly working -class: He was the son of a successful lawyer. But he was from Oklahoma, far from clubby Boston, and he was Black.

Let's be clear. Dr. Morison was not stupid.. Nor was he evil. He did that professional historian thing of asking questions, of trying to understand, trying to see past his own inheritance as a posh and privileged son of Boston.

Dr. Morison was publicly critical of Nazi Germany’s oppression of Jews in the 1930s. He partly rewrote his popular US history textbook in response to criticisms from the NAACP, and from black historians. Note that word partly, because he couldn't see through the fog of what he had first learned from the earliest generation of professional historians, who were in their heyday when he was studying for his PhD.

In writing his textbook, which was used in schools across America, Samuel Eliot Morison had to rely on the scholarly work of those first academic historians. In writing about American slavery and enslaved people, he turned to the work of Yale professor Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, the first historian who had taken a crack at a serious history of slavery.

So here’s the problem: Ulrich B. Phillips was born into a privileged white family in rural Georgia in 1877. That was the year Reconstruction ended, the year the federal government gave up trying to reform the South after the Civil War. Washington abandoned black Southerners to the rule of white Southerners, who then subjected everyone (and I do mean everyone) to the horrors of Jim Crow segregation and racist violence. Historian Ulrich Philips very much shared the racist views of practically all white Georgians of his era, and they were embedded in the history he wrote, and Samuel Eliot Morison read. To Phillips, the history of Southern slavery was all about the myths of enslavers’ “kindness” and enslaved people’s “happiness”.

Longtime NBH readers won't be surprised to learn that Phillips was a member of the so-called Dunning School of white and mostly Southern historians who gathered in the PhD program at New York’s Columbia University. They had been drawn there by William Archibald Dunning, a clueless Northern liberal professor, an opponent of slavery who had nonetheless held racist views, who knocked out a rubbish book on Reconstruction.

So Dunning’s students and other like-minded people wrote dodgy history to justify racism, slavery, and segregation. Why didn’t other historians argue with Phillips and the other members of the Dunning School? Well, black historians and sociologists did, but white historians, many of whom shared the prejudices of white people of their turn-of-the-century era, soon cast them into the wilderness, where they could be safely ignored.

By the 1930s, a new generation of white historians were starting to shake off the nonsense and were headed in a very different direction, toward what black historians had been showing all along. Heck, even the older Samuel Eliot Morison was willing to listen to the NAACP (sort of) and revise his textbook (sort of) to delete some of the ghastly Dunning School stuff (sort of), and that’s progress. But in the early 20th century, the historical profession was just emerging in America, and it was doing so in the most racist time in its history.

Let me explain: The Dunning School worked hard to exclude black scholars from its club, including the first black Harvard PhD W.E.B. Du Bois. Dr. Du Bois presented a paper titled “Reconstruction and Its Benefits”. to a gobsmacked audience at the American Historical Association (AHA) meeting in 1909. The Dunning School had told everyone that Reconstruction failed thanks to lazy, stupid, and corrupt black people. Du Bois showed with tons of evidence (his PhD was in sociology) that they were wrong. They didn't invite him back. No black historian was invited to present at the AHA again until 1940.

Black historians were never officially banned by the American Historical Association (founded 1884, soon after the end of Reconstruction), but they might as well have been. Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the second black scholar to earn a Harvard PhD, and the first to do so in history, got fed up with paying his AHA dues while not being allowed to speak at its meetings. Black scholars, starting with W.E. B. Du Bois, were frustrated with trying to combat the myths churned out as low quality “history” by the Dunning School. Many fled to the friendlier field of sociology and identified as sociologists. Carter Woodson didn't want to do that. He started up a historical association for black historians, and established a journal for Black history.

Three years after W.E.B. Du Bois got a hostile reception at the AHA, Samuel Eliot Morison got his PhD, in 1912, in America’s worst era of anti-Black racism (including segregation, lynching, and the horrendous Atlanta Massacre of 1906). No surprise that Dr. Morison ignored black historians and their scholarship: They weren’t part of the in-crowd at the American Historical Association meeting, and anyway, they were black. Oy.

Can I just say here that I’m certain I was in plenty of historian company in not knowing any of this dire history of the historical profession as a grad student in California in the late 1980s, as the American history profession was starting to really diversify? I just assumed that, two decades after the Sixties, the American historical profession was finally reaping the benefit of the civil rights and women’s rights movements and the expansion of higher education to non-posh people. I had no idea that American history had this awful history of its own, or that much of that history had yet to be written. I never thought to ask, because I didn't know what the questions were.

In the 1930s, young PhD student John Hope Franklin had to grit his teeth while meeting with the clueless middle-aged Professor Morison. But those meetings made Franklin all the more determined to write a better American history, and reach more people with it.

The American historical profession, like American history, didn't get stuck in the early 20th century, and among the people we can thank for helping push it forward is John Hope Franklin. What Dr. Franklin had in common with his professor Samuel Eliot Morison was that he was a man of his background and time, who happened to be a historian. Dr. Franklin’s background , however, was very different from the cushy life of Dr.. Morison: His was a segregated youth in a black neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, being educated in schools that were segregated by law, not by choice, and growing up in the traumatized aftermath of one of US history’s most shocking events. After graduating as valedictorian of his high school, a school named for Booker T. Washington, a black educator who had gone along with segregation, John Hope Franklin left Oklahoma. He would spend most of his life in the South, even during segregation, but he never lived in Tulsa again. That was a city in which, as I have said of Atlanta, history hangs heavy.

John Hope Franklin, arriving at Harvard in the 1930s, and representing the next generation of black Harvard history PhDs after Carter Woodson, saw times beginning to change, and opportunity to make progress happen in academic history.

In 1947, Dr. Franklin published From Slavery to Freedom, the first and very influential textbook on Black history. It is still in print, but has been rewritten over the years to reflect massive amounts of new and exciting work by historians, including whites, including women. This is how history changes.

In a used bookstore in London in the late 1970s, a very young Annette Laing excitedly discovered a copy of From Slavery to Freedom. My very first interest in American history had been triggered by seeing Roots on the BBC. Young as I was, never having visited America, raised in a working - class Britain that was still almost entirely white, and with no background in US history, I found Dr. Franklin’s book a tough read. But I did learn from it, and it did get me interested in learning more.

Dr. Franklin did even more than write scholarly history, and spread evidence -based American history through his books, important though these things were. He also pioneered desegregating the historical profession, bringing black and white historians back together. He joined the American Historical Association, was active in it, and in 1979, became the AHA’s first African-American president.

Lifting as We Climb

“I really do think this has to be the only park named for an historian,” I said to Hoosen as we got out of the car on a quiet Sunday in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. “How exciting. I wonder if Dr. Franklin knew about this in advance?”

We were visiting the John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park, and I was sure I knew where the “Reconciliation” came from. It was about picking up the pieces of a catastrophe in Tulsa—more on that shortly. But I also like to think that “Reconciliation” referred to Dr. Franklin’s work to reconcile black and white historians, to bring us back together, and to attract young people of all backgrounds into our profession, hoping to be free to study whatever draws our curiosity and interest, no matter our backgrounds.

I met an elderly Dr. John Hope Franklin once, long ago, and made a fool of myself trying to explain what he had done for me. He was so lovely and kind, maybe remembering how W.E.B. Du Bois had made him feel like crap when he had tried, as a graduate student, to pay his respects to the Great Man. My warm memory of encountering Dr. Franklin in a hallway at the AHA meeting was one big reason I was here at the park, to say a silent final thanks.

Today, Tulsa—Black, Native, and even many white people these days— proudly owns John Hope Franklin. A large memorial in the park provides an exhaustive list of his accomplishments, awards he won, and even a TV show he appeared on—that’s how the public knows, it thinks, that a historian was really important: He was on the telly. At the end of the list, the plaque includes this quote from John Hope Franklin himself:

On the history of African Americans

“In discussing the history of a people one must distinguish between what has actually happened and what those who have written the history have said has happened. So far as the actual history of the American Negro is concerned, there is nothing particularly new about it. It is an exciting story, a remarkable story. It is the story of slavery and freedom, humanity and inhumanity, democracy and its denial. It is tragedy and triumph, suffering and compassion, sadness and joy.”

African-American history, in short, is not the rubbish that the Dunning School wrote. It never was. It wasn't news to black Americans. I still remember watching a TV interview with Dr. Franklin as he talked delightedly of the petitions that enslaved people wrote to the Massachusetts legislature during the American Revolution, I recall watching as he cheerfully renamed an 1898 event in Wilmington, North Carolina, formerly known as “race riot”, as what it was: a coup, one that ended progressive interracial government in that city. Dr . Franklin was among those who gave me a more believable American history, one that was more like the honest British history I had learned at school, a recognizably human past.

Then there’s this plaque:

Dr. JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN

who forever changed the way that Americans think of themselves and their past. In honor of his courage, honesty, tenacity, and indomitable spirit, this RECONCILIATION PARK is dedicated October 27, 2010

Courage? Oh, yes. Dr. Franklin got death threats for his black history textbook. Had Twitter been a thing, he would have been canceled over and over.

And now, these words from the plaque:

Pioneering historian, world-renowned scholar, and brilliant son of Tulsa, whose family survived the race riot of 1921.

Ah, here we go. Our first hint. This park, while dedicated to Dr. Franklin, isn’t really about Dr. Franklin.

At the entrance to the Park’s labyrinth-like Healing Walkway, there’s a stone marker inscribed with a quote from a Franklin, but it isn’t John Hope Franklin. “Lifting as we climb—The eternal verities shall prevail” are the words of Buck Colbert (B.C.) Franklin, a Tulsa lawyer, a major figure in his own right.

Lifting as we climb, indeed. I read these words again, and, Brits, I suddenly thought of Aneurin (Nye) Bevan, the Welshman who went down the coal mines to help support his family at the age of 14, who became a politician and founded the National Health Service, and who urged working people to “rise with your class, not out of it.”

That was also long the philosophy of privileged black Americans who believed that their success should be shared with others. Privileged black Americans? I invite you to read about Mary Church Terrell for starters.

In 2023, I wrote about Dr. Alison M. Parker’s fantastic biography of Mary Church Terrell:

And the “eternal verities shall prevail”? That’s just a grander version of the proverb “the truth will out,” or, as I would put it, you can only BS for so long before reality bites back. That's as hopeful a thought as I can imagine. Historians know well that the truth will out eventually, but not usually until after a ton of suffering. That's why we usually hide during stressful times, waiting for the smoke to clear before we get to work. For my part, I interpret the “eternal verities”, the truth, to mean that black people are people. B.C. Franklin’s son John Hope Franklin also wanted everyone to know that.

We know quite a bit about B.C. Franklin, thanks to the 1997 publication of My Life and An Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin. This book drew extensively on B.C. Franklin’s writings, and was edited by B.C. Franklin’s son, John Hope Franklin, and his grandson, John Whittington Franklin, who graduated from Harvard, and spent more than thirty years in research and management at the Smithsonian. I read the book a few years ago, it was fascinating, and I recommend it, but I can’t lay my hands on it right now, so this is just a sketch.

Meet Buck Franklin

He called himself B.C. Franklin. If he had not, white men, who themselves expected to be addressed as Mister So-and-So, would have called him by his first name, Buck. They routinely tried to demean a middle-class man of color whose first name they knew by addressing him by it.

Buck Colbert Franklin, John Hope Franklin’s father, was born in Oklahoma. Buck's father, David, was of African descent and had formerly been enslaved. David fought for the Union (Northern) Army in the American Civil War, then settled in Oklahoma and became a successful rancher. B.C. Franklin’s mother, Millie Colbert Franklin, was of African and Choctaw descent, and was raised in Choctaw culture on the Choctaw reservation.

B.C. Franklin was born in 1879 on Chickasaw tribal land in Oklahoma. He was accepted to a black college in Tennessee: colleges were strictly segregated in the South. From there, Buck Franklin followed his mentor John Hope (a graduate of posh but not segregated Brown University) to Atlanta, when Hope took a teaching job at Georgia’s Atlanta Baptist College, now known as Morehouse College. After graduation from Morehouse, Buck Franklin returned to Oklahoma with Mollie, his college-educated wife. The couple tried ranching but ran into trouble, as so many farmers do, and both became teachers to support themselves and their growing family.

Through apprenticeship to lawyers, and a university correspondence course in law, Buck Colbert was admitted to the Oklahoma Bar. The family moved to Rentiesville, where Buck set up his law practice and also started a local newspaper, not unusual actions among entrepreneurial men of means in turn of the century America, who were keen to profit from small towns built along the railroad tracks.

Rentiesville was different, though. It was made up entirely of African-American citizens, who were denied a decent life in most of Oklahoma’s towns and cities. Rentiesville is where John Hope Franklin was born. But his father was ambitious and decided in early 1921 to move both law practice and family to the big city of Tulsa, where the black population was growing fast. For more than twenty years, a black middle-class had boomed in the segregated Greenwood District, fueled by the oil money then driving Tulsa’s economy, and the arrival of talented and ambitious people drawn by Greenwood’s reputation: Black educator and advocate of black business enterprise Booker T. Washington had dubbed Greenwood the Negro Wall Street. B.C. Franklin wanted to be part of this exciting place. He moved to Tulsa to set up a new practice with partners in early 1921, leaving behind Millie, his wife and his youngest children (including John) in Rentiesville, until he could save enough money for a house.

Let’s pause Buck Franklin’s story for a moment, and talk about what eventually became of his son, John. John Hope Franklin grew up, went to college, married his college sweetheart Aurelia Whittington, with whom he had a son, and earned a PhD in history from Harvard in 1941. He became a great historian, and eventually professor of history at Duke University. Dr. Franklin also loved the outdoors, fly fishing and gardening. He was a keen orchidist, and cultivated more than 300 specimens in his greenhouse. In short, Dr. John Hope Franklin was a scholar and a gentleman, who came face to face with the hard facts of American history. He did this not only through the documents he encountered in archives, which as he said made for tough reading, but also through his life. When he was just seven years old, old enough to know when things were terribly wrong, John Hope Franklin suddenly learned that even his right to exist, much less his right to aspire and live the life he wanted to live, was in terrible danger.

When John Hope Franklin was just seven years old, the comfortable middle-class world his father and other black people had built in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was destroyed in two days of fire, bombing, and murder.

Hostility, Humiliation, and Hope

In the John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park in Tulsa, Oklahoma, I took a good look at a soaring three-sided cement structure. Each side bears a statue, and a single word in bold letters visible from a distance.

HOSTILITY is a statue of a heavily-armed white man in early 20th century working-class garb.

HUMILIATION is a black man holding up his hands and a broad-brimmed hat in surrender.

And then there’s HOPE, a smiling man who could be Black, could be Native, could be both, holding up a newborn baby.

“I think Dr. Franklin was partly of Native ancestry”, I said uncertainly to Hoosen. “Maybe the baby is supposed to be him?”

The structure is about the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. The baby in the sculpture is not John Hope Franklin. When he was born in Rentiesville, successful Black Tulsans were showing America a whole new world of possibility, a triumph over a wretched legacy of slavery and segregation. When things fell apart for black people in Tulsa, in May, 1921, John Hope Franklin was already seven years old.

But in the Jim Crow era, many white Southerners were not happy for any success among their black neighbors: They resented them. In Tulsa in 1921, that resentment turned to appalling violence, just as it had in Atlanta in 1906, and Wilmington, NC in 1898. Everything for which Black people in Greenwood had worked so hard was taken from them, not by natural disaster, but by their white neighbors.

Over a horrifying two days in 1921, what has come to be known as the Tulsa Race Massacre took place. I’ll be writing about it soon in more detail, and about the Black community’s responses. Today, just some basics: Resentful whites launched a massive attack on the Greenwood District, both businesses and homes, and murdered anything up to three hundred people. The numbers of dead aren’t clear, and may never be known, but know this: the trauma of people seeing their lives destroyed went well beyond numbers, and well beyond 1921.

In May, 1921, when disaster struck, Buck Colbert Franklin had only recently set up his law practice in the Greenwood District. He survived the Tulsa Race Massacre, although he lost his offices. Undaunted, he immediately resumed business in a tent, and started helping people file lawsuits. This was hope.

John Hope Franklin finally moved to Tulsa with his mother to join his father in 1925, when he was about eleven. He came to Tulsa after four years of recovery and reconstruction, when memories were still very fresh and painful. And think on this: This was not so long ago. The last survivor of the Massacre, Lessie Benningfield Randle, is still alive as I write, at 111 years old.

So why was John Franklin’s middle name Hope? When he was born, he was named for his father’s mentor and friend, distinguished educator John Hope of Georgia, son of a free black woman and her white partner, James Hope, a Scottish businessman who lived with and loved his family. That this was possible in Georgia , a state in which the couple could not legally marry, was a sign of hope. Their son John Hope could have passed for white, but he chose to remain with his community. He became the first Black president of what would one day be called Morehouse College.

However, John Hope Franklin was not named Hope because his birth gave hope to Tulsa’s black community after a catastrophe that seemed to wipe out all hope of rising from slavery, segregation, powerlessness, and poverty.

Yet Dr. Franklin’s life did inspire hope in Tulsa, as the naming of the park attests. I wondered how much the need for hope, for recovery and reconciliation in Tulsa, for hope for a happier America, inspired Dr. Franklin’s career, his life? He’s quoted on a memorial in the park:

“I want to be out there on the firing line, helping, directing or doing something to try to make this a better world, a better place to live.”—John Hope Franklin

I think now of Dr. Franklin pottering in his greenhouse, tending to his orchids, fly fishing in some river, sorting through archives, talking with his students, and even giving the time of day to a young white British historian whom he didn’t know, whom he had inspired with his work, and his very existence. I think of the black scholars who, seeing me viciously kicked around the history department in which I was employed in Georgia for being an outspoken non-Southern woman, shepherded me into the Africana Studies program. I owe John Hope Franklin big time for helping open the historical profession to women, too, as I tried haplessly to tell him some thirty years ago, in the middle of the hallway at the American Historical Association conference, a place where, once, neither of us would have been welcome.

Mail on the Way!

Nonnies (paid subscribers to Non-Boring History) who sign up (free of additional charge!);get occasional postcards from my travels, written in my inimitable scrawl. This new batch of mail went out just yesterday! Not signed up? Nonnies, hit reply from your email and let me know your name and address. Free reader? Join us!

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I meant to send you a fun and fluffy post today. But then life tapped my shoulder. It's been hard to write NBH with so many elephants in the room. This one, I couldn't ignore. And…

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Note from Annette

For five years now, this academic historian (PhD and all that), Brit in America, former professor, and genuinely non-posh person has been writing Non-Boring History, assisted only in the practical housekeeping stuff by Hoosen, my long-suffering spouse, on the editorial end by a crack team of Gnomes, and by the good people who fund this renegade professor’s Quixotic mission with their paid subscriptions.

Since 2021, I’ve taken many epic road trips across America and Britain, and even visited Canada (Hello, lovely Canadians! See? I remember you exist!). History is everywhere we look, and, no, it’s not just a dreary parade through stuff you vaguely recall from high school, or a guilt trip to learn yet more obscure names you imagine you need to memorize for an imaginary test at the end of your life. A pox on that: I thoroughly enjoy history, and want you to, too.

Every summer, I invite you to get out and see for yourself, with Non-Boring History Summer Bingo!

Whether you simply pop down to your local museum, or take a historical road trip, it’s all good. No need to complete the bingo card below, but, for the full experience, be sure to talk with volunteers, locals, and fellow visitors. Yes, in 2026, I’m asking you to chat with people you don’t know! The biggest adventure of all!

Play Summer Museum Bingo!

Here’s a version to download or print, and take with you!

Bingo 2026 Pdf

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Nonnies (paid subscribers): Want to share a picture or two from your adventures? Send us to me through the usual channels. Not a Nonnie? Join us!

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Ooh, Where to Go? What to Do?

No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, surveys show that chances are excellent you’re more curious than ever about history. And you are who Non-Boring History is for! Armchair traveler? I got you! But if you have itchy feet and yearn to get out of the house, whether or not you’re playing Non-Boring History Summer Museum Bingo, you may be wondering where you should go for a satisfying history fix.

No bucket list here! That’s a ghastly way to live life, in perpetual anxiety, worrying about not completing silly goals. Instead, NBH offers hundreds of posts for inspiration and choice, discovered on my haphazard road trips. Now, I do realize the “haphazard road trip” (or scavenger/treasure hunt) approach to discovery is not for everyone. The late Laura McCarty, President of Georgia Humanities (the state humanities council), and a SuperNonnie (Patron of Non-Boring History), was, I think, a little baffled by my randomness (and my love of occasional crappy museums and offbeat historical sites). One day, Laura tactfully suggested I contact state humanities councils and get the names of the best museums to share with you.

But what fun would that be, eh? Listen, I know that people go to any history-related thingy that strikes their fancy, not just those Approved by Experts. Hey, I endorse that! I do too! Never know what you’re gonna find.

And while choice of museums is important, we sometimes find the choice is made for us by kids/circumstance/pushy pals. Good to have some idea of how to make the best of things wherever we end up.

One more thing. . . The very idea of giving you a shortlist of museum recommendations makes me nervous. Suppose you drive hours to get somewhere on my say-so, hate it, and blame me? That’s why I prefer to take you with me for my good-faith takes on a huge variety of historic attractions, from battlefields to chocolate factory museums. I hope to inspire you to pursue your historical interests, and—best of all- to get out of your comfort zone and try something new. Hoosen and I drive a lot to show what you might get out of and enjoy at any history place, whether it’s a big-arse grand la-di-dah museum in Washington DC (which can be overwhelming) or a dusty old local museum down the street. Oh, and my appreciation for those dusty local museums increased once I realized that chatty and friendly volunteers are the valuable exhibits, not the piles of random crap (and a big thanks to Learned Colleagues MC and MB for alerting me that this is the case).

I do feel a bit guilty that I dismissed Laura’s thoughtful idea out of hand. So, especially for my readers in the US (where there may be up to 300,000 museums and historic houses), here are my Laura McCarty Memorial Museum Suggestions

1: Any National Park or National Park Type Thingy

See? That’s a nice flexible suggestion! Most National Park Service (NPS) parks of any kind have a historical display. Those with “Historical” in the name are the best bet, of course, the most likely to offer free admission, and the least likely to be overrun in summer, especially if they’re not about The History Everyone Remembers from High School. Plus even NPS history sites often have an outdoorsy bit or even hiking trails for a lovely walk. Some NPS museums are better or more recently updated than others, this is true, but don’t judge by fame or popularity: My absolute favorite museums in general are those most people have never heard of. They really have made me think.

I haven't written about any of the following places yet at NBH, but Hoosen and I got a thoroughly warm welcome in Topeka, Kansas, from the absolutely lovely staff at the Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park, which is about the battle to desegregate American schools. We had a fun time in Arkansas at the visitors’ center at Hot Springs National Park, which was in a very grand former spa resort hotel. And we were tickled by the unexpected remains of a 19th century hospital that long ago offered cheap and free healthcare in the middle of nowhere, Colorado, at Fort Union National Monument!

NPS historical places come under a variety of names (like National Monument), and many private museums naughtily call themselves National and may charge a steep admission, so watch out. Here’s some help: Link here to get a very useful free app to help you find the National Park Service museums of your dreams!

And before I forget, the US Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service, runs some excellent museums under other brands, including the Bureau of Land Management. The BLM, complete with its own park rangers in beige prison guard-like uniform, operates the National Historic Trails Interpretive Centers in Casper, WY, and the California Trail Interpretive Center in Elko, Nevada. Look out for those, too!

2: Any Native Nation/Reservation Tribal Museum*

*except maybe the Navajo Nation museum which kinda sucks, Sorry, Navajo Nation, but, large as you are, and much as I otherwise enjoy my visits to the rez, I’m afraid the current half-hearted museum was not worth a detour. Sorry if that seems rude, but you obviously want visitors, or your public museum wouldn’t exist at all, right? I’m also aware that you May Have Reasons beyond cost. But do give me a shout if you decide to upgrade the displays with income from the new casinos, which I also understand from chats with Navajo folk are not without controversy. To show my goodwill, I recently stayed at your fabulous Twin Arrows Hotel and Casino near Flagstaff, and made a small donation (cough). Hope that helps.

Tribal museums (not the Navajo one) will knock your socks off. I am thinking not only of the jawdroppingly flashy and professional establishments into which casino dollars have been poured, but also modest museums done on a small budget, and typically staffed by warm and welcoming volunteers (shout-outs to Shaun at the Zuni Pueblo Visitors’ Center in New Mexico, and the nicely-done little Catawba Cultural Center, which I bet is about to get waaaay better, now the casino is open.)

The only tricky thing is that tribal museums aren’t always easy to find (look on Google maps wherever you are) and they aren’t always called museums. I mentioned to a friend the beyond-Smithsonian quality of the Chickasaw Cultural Center, and she said, “Nah, I wouldn’t go to something called that.” She was convinced that it’s a cultural center purely for Chickasaw people, and that she would be intruding. Let me be clear: You are not only welcome, non-Native folk, you’re a huge reason museums like the Chickasaw Cultural Center exist. It also works with archaeologist and historians to tell terrific stories. Welcome, y’all!*

*Hey, the Chickasaw Cultural Center is in Oklahoma. Native people here have Oklahoma accents, because of course they do.

Here’s my take from my visit to the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma and the Chickasaw Cultural Center. It also happens to include an interview with me on historian Dr. John Fea’s podcast, The Way of Improvement, in case you're interested. I've temporarily unlocked the post so everyone can enjoy:

As my annual and quarterly subscribers know, going paid at NBH is a whole other level. You get big perks, more access to me and NBH, including hundreds of takes like this at your fingertips. Most importantly, you become a partner at Non-Boring History, enabling my full-time mission to show why real history matters to everyone, how it challenges us (and how we can learn to appreciate and enjoy the challenge) and how history enriches our lives.

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More Trucking With History

On Saturday, my post (above) was about my visit to a Freedom Truck. Freedom Trucks are six identical museums on wheels currently touring America as part of Freedom250, a last-minute (2025) initiative by President Donald J. Trump’s White House to mark America’s 250th birthday, not to be confused with—but inevitably confused with— America250, the bipartisan program set up that Congress set up ten years ago, in 2016.

Today, I decided to ask AI about Freedom Trucks. I hate doing this, knowing that every time we use AI, another tortuously noisy and ugly data center gets built next to someone's house. But people are using AI (God help us), so I wanted to know what it's telling them. Here’s what Google’s AI had to say in answer to my question, “What is a Freedom Truck?”

Freedom Trucks are a fleet of six massive 18-wheeler semi-trailers that operate as traveling mobile museums. Created to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the United States, they tour the country bringing interactive, multimedia exhibits about the nation’s founding directly to schools, military bases, and community gatherings. The traveling exhibitions feature several distinct characteristics and experiences.

Interactive Exhibits: Visitors can digitally sign the Declaration of Independence and test their civics knowledge with touch-screen quizzes.Artificial Intelligence: The trucks utilize AI-generated figures of historical individuals, such as George Washington, Betsy Ross, and the Marquis Lafayette, to narrate the story of the American Revolution.

American Heroes Wall: Displays highlight 50 figures who have shaped the country’s history.

Organization & Support: The tour was developed by the educational platform PragerU in partnership with Hillsdale College and Freedom 250, and received a federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

The trucks aim to reach Americans who might not otherwise be able to visit traditional history institutions on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

This sounds like a press release, doesn’t it? AI depends on “scraping” the web for info. Beneath this summary was cited an odd range of sources. Several professional journos have reported criticisms of Freedom Trucks, including reporters from The Washington Post and The Guardian. Curiously, these criticisms were not mentioned in the AI summary, even when it cited the sources. This is important. I know AI invites people to ask for more info, but let's get real. Most people don't ask any more questions in life than they think they have to, or beg for more detail than they think they need. This is a problem when history, the word, comes from the Greek historia, meaning learning by asking questions, not “his story” or “one damn thing after another.” It’s not a great sign about the state of education that so few people think to ask questions. So, in short, it’s a good bet that people just take the AI summary as gospel. Which in this case, is a bit ironic.

Something I didn’t realize when I was writing my post on Freedom Trucks: Journos have reported that PragerU (not a university), and heavily credited in the Truck exhibits, is not a donor to the Trucks, as I had assumed. PragerU got a huge grant from the federal government to build the Freedom Trucks. The money given to PragerU came the federal Institute of Museum and Library services. That money was intended for grants to accredited museums and libraries, who had won a rigorous and competitive selection grant process. Instead, their grants were cancelled, and the millions handed to PragerU to build these portable museums.

Why does this matter? Journos have complained of the exhibit’s Christian nationalist interpretation, of which potential visitors at least ought to be aware. And PragerU is, well, not what visitors might understandably assume, a university. I chat about this in my post.

Now I learn that PragerU is not the only outfit credited with developing Truck “content” even though this wasn't made clear when I visited. Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian small liberal arts college (Brits, think university) ounded by political pundit and theorist William F. Buckley with a definite perspective, but entirely legit and accredited, was also apparently involved in consulting on the Freedom Trucks.

Here’s the thing: I do wonder if Hillsdale’s historians had anything to do with the Freedom Trucks, or if it was the doing of college administrators, or faculty from disciplines with lower standards? Suddenly thinking of my late Learned Colleague Dr. George Shriver, an ordained Baptist minister and professional historian, who refused to write the official history of our university unless he was given free rein to be honest. Instead, the administration gave the job to an English professor who was willing to avoid offending anyone with the whole truth.

I would very much like to know about Hillsdale’s role in developing Freedom Trucks, because I —genuinely—very much doubt its historians had anything to do with it. All the history professors at Hillsdale have real PhDs, from reputable institutions (including Yale, Oxford, and the University of Pennsylvania). Any historian who would endorse an exhibit that has obvious errors, deliberate half-truths, and—above all—avoids engaging with professional history would be an affront to the values and standards of our profession, going against our entire training. I don’t assume that these guys were involved in Freedom Trucks. I would be shocked if they were. I would be happy to hear from any of these Learned Friends in confidence, either way.

UPDATE (7/6/26): Needless to say, nobody from Hillsdale got in touch. But I have discovered—not to my shock—that the Freedom Truck text is credited to a professor of government/administrator. Not a historian: I imagine the historians are hiding, as we always are in such circumstances. I could excuse this as the work of someone from a lesser discipline than history, but I would still give him a highly quizzical look, because surely the standards aren’t that low, that he would get his history from such non-scholarly sources?.

Before anyone thinks I'm being naive, let me drive this home: Professional historians hold political views across the political spectrum. No reputable historian ignores evidence in pursuit of argument. That's what brings us together.

While I'm on the subject, any historian who takes a partisan stance (no matter which party) in writing about history for the public, and allows people to believe they represent academic history and all historians is a disgrace. This is why I keep telling you I don't want to lead a cult, why I encourage my readers to read widely, why I ask my academic Learned Friends to tell me when I goof big time, and why I promise that when I do mess up, it’s not for the want of trying, and I will let you know. This is also why NBH is not intended to be read in bits and pieces. I'm telling a bigger story for people who care about the future of history, not offering trivial tidbits or political rants.

Among real historians are deeply religious evangelical and conservative Christians, with earned PhDs in history from accredited universities. I have known several such historians, and was a grad school pal of two of them. I cannot imagine that any of the honorable and decent men I've known would be comfortable with half-truths, evasions, and downright dishonesty in a historical exhibit.

Historians’ personal political and religious views are far less important to good academic history than people think. What matters far more in history is our willingness to deal honestly with what we find in archives, and what we learn from the scholarly work of other historians who burrow in archives. We can disagree in the history we write, but we must all supply tons of evidence to support the scholarly arguments we have with each other.

Integrity really matters, because if we don't trust each other, we can't do history worth writing or teaching. Writing history while deliberately ignoring the enormous body of peer-reviewed scholarship by history PhDs flies in the face of pursuing truth through archival evidence. Our training and our Learned Friends won't let us do it. This obviously doesn't apply to those who write non-academic popular history (although some are very good, and choose to follow historians’ standards), but that's another discussion. Nor does it apply to academics with PhDs in other subjects, and that, too, is another discussion.

Does this expectation apply to public history, the history presented to the public in professionally-curated museums? Let me put it this way: It bloody well should. What distinguishes a professional museum from an amateur one is much the same as what distinguishes a professional historian from a dabbler: Deep knowledge and dedication to dealing honestly and thoroughly with all evidence, including modern evidence-based historians’ work, by curators’ reading a ton of stuff. In professional academic and public history, pretending that the work of thousands of modern professional historians from the last eighty years or more doesn't exist, in order to pursue a pre-decided political narrative, is incompetent at best, immoral at worst. Oh, and by the way? That zinger is aimed at scholars across the political spectrum, and for good reason. Don’t assume it only goes one way. OOoh! Now there’s an earworm to leave you with!

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America or Freedom?

“A Freedom Truck is in Rockford tomorrow and Tuesday!” I told Hoosen. “Let’s go!”

Hoosen looked confused. “What’s a Freedom Truck?”

“It’s a museum on wheels, put together for the se…

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Note from Annette

Okay, I’m kicking off with something that’s going to seem totally random, but IT’S NOT! It’s highly relevant! This week, travel writer addressed one possible fallout of people being replaced by AI and machines, using the example of Brenda, the lovely receptionist at his condo complex. Brent then moves on to raise the question of why, as supposed customers, we are spending so much time doing paperwork and other numbing chores, and often on apps that suck. Brent has inspired me to write about today’s subject, although that’s not obvious at all. Here's his post (and do sign up for his and ’s newsletter)

Brent and Michael Are Going Places

What If They Replaced Brenda with an Automated Kiosk?

For the audio version of this article, read by the author, go here…

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2 months ago · 25 likes · 6 comments · Brent Hartinger

I have, as it happens, met this very same Brenda, my fellow Scot, and can confirm she’s terrific—efficient, energetic, chatty, and friendly. Scots are a friendly lot. As my Scottish self, I have to ask: Why wouldn’t someone want friendly interaction with people we meet on the regular, or even for the first time? Why are people determined to be miserable gits, grumping at everyone who tries to engage with them, muttering about boundaries and randos?

Humans are, by nature, social animals. Sure, there are exceptions. But, for most of us, being around people is essential, and even a great way to spend much of our lives. We tell stories, laugh, and live life together. What’s wrong with that? Even when we’re having fun together in a workplace, we still get plenty of work done, for heavens sake. Ignore Mr. Scrooge in the corner office: Many jobs once required us only to be available, for when needed. It was only with the arrival of bloodless studies of efficiency in the 20th century that we all started to be required to be pedal to the metal all the time.

Now, more and more of us are being told, eh, our services might soon not be needed at all. My dad saw this coming. He was an early tech bro who started his career in the late 1960s, designing satellites (yes, we still lived in a council house/public housing, this was postwar Britain). Not as early a tech bro as my grandad, who helped design radar towers during WWII. But still early. My dad always said robots would eventually take over, and that we need to be educated for a life of mentally-engaging leisure, including socializing. I remember looking at him in that way teenage girls look at their dads when they talk rubbish.

Now even tech bros are quietly admitting that, um, my dad’s techie AI utopia can’t happen unless the world, um, goes socialist. Even that staggering admission doesn’t begin to close the Pandora’s box they have opened. Speaking of AI utopias, I came across this article, on how AI is being used as an excuse to lay people off, and asking if this is wise, and this one, about how the California State University system embraced AI like the Second Coming, and has ended up a mess. Oh, dear. What a surprise. I never guessed such things would happen.

In his terrific post about replacing Brenda, Brent Hartinger also laments—as we all should— how people are being separated from people, breaking down community, and how our lives are being further diminished, our freedom to spend our lives as we wish, by always having to deal with stupid tech.

Tech in general is a relatively new problem. What is not new are the many ways in which people have lost freedom, thanks to others seeking to profit from them, and the sacrifices and effort they have made to regain that freedom. Many people over the centuries have immigrated to America in the hope of owning land, to be their own bosses, and thus to be free to direct their own lives: of course, this obviously did not apply to people who were enslaved. But the entire sentence above starting with “What is not new . . .” , that definitely applied to enslaved people.

Gobsmacking News from 1777

I’m currently reading historian Dr. Gloria McCahon Whiting’s Belonging: An Intimate History of Slavery and Family in Early New England.

Before I settled down to read Belonging, I took a rapid riffle through the book, and spotted a long quote from one of the bunch of petitions that were sent to the Massachusetts authorities during the American Revolution. All of them basically posed this challenging question: Droning on about liberty is all very well, guys, but how about actually making people free?

All these petitions were written by enslaved people. This particular one, quoted in Belonging, was sent in 1777, the year after the Declaration of Independence. Let's take a look.

Wait, Laing, I thought slaves weren’t allowed to read and write? And what’s this about slavery in Massachusetts? Whoa.

Slavery wasn’t just a thing in Britain’s American colonies in the 18th century South. Slavery was everywhere in Britain’s American colonies. Yes, everywhere, even in Massachusetts, home to the people formerly known as Puritans. Yes, the same Massachusetts that would later become most associated with the abolition of slavery. Slavery existed throughout Massachusetts and the whole New England region, but especially in and around the Massachusetts capital of Boston.

That said, life for enslaved people in New England was very different from how it was in southern colonies like Virginia or South Carolina. New England did not have huge plantations, worked by large numbers of slaves growing single export crops of tobacco or rice on which the entire colony’s economy depended. In New England, an enslaved person was typically the only black person among white people, on a small family farm that raised all sorts of plants and animals, mostly for local consumption. Slaves also worked in households as servants, and in small businesses as craftsmen— a job that often required literacy.

So that’s a big hint. In 18th century New England, enslaved people had opportunities that slaves in the South did not. Southern slaves in the 1700s were forbidden to learn to write, forbidden to attend ministers’ classes, and, unless they were among the few who worked in slaveholders’ mansions rather than in the fields, rarely or never came across books. Not surprisingly, only a few enslaved people found their way to literacy in the Southern colonies.

Enslaved people in 18th century New England, however, had a much greater chance of learning to read and write, living closely with literate people in a bookish and religious culture that prized Bible reading for all. Books, pamphlets, and newspapers, or at least a Bible, were present in every home. People didn’t have to hide their literacy.

But slavery was still slavery. And nobody expressed that better than enslaved people. In New England in the 1770s, enslaved people sometimes banded together and expressed their grievances in writing, including those who wrote and signed this petition in 1777.

(I’m showing you the original petition first, but, in case you can't be arsed with the old-school English, I’ve also translated it into 21st century lingo below)

The Original from 1777

The Petition of a Grate Number of Blackes of this Province who...are... deprived of every thing that hath a tendency to make life even tolerable, the endearing ties of husband and wife we are strangers to for we are no longer man and wife then our masters or Mestreses thinkes proper marred or onmarred Our Children are also taken from us by force and sent maney miles from us wear we seldom or ever see them again there to be made slaves of fore Life which sumtimes is verey short by Reson of Being dragged from their mothers Breest Thus our Lives are imbittered to us on these accounts By our deplorable situation we are rendered incapable of shewing our obedience to Almighty God how can a Slave perform the duties of a husband to a wife or parent to his child How can a husband leave master and work and Cleave to his wife How can the wife submit themselves to there Husbands in all things. How can the child obey thear parents in all things.

-Petition to the Massachusetts Governor, his Council, and the Province’s House of Representatives, 1774

Annette’s Translation

We, the undersigned, represent a huge number of enslaved Black people in Massachusetts. Let’s get straight to the point: We are deprived of everything that makes life worth living. We can't even enjoy our loving marriages, because our masters and mistresses decide whether we can remain together, a power they retain even when we’re legally married. Our children are slaves for life, and often taken from us by force, and sent miles away, where we seldom or never see them again. Sometimes, our stolen babies have very short lives, having been dragged away from their mothers while still nursing.

These are just some reasons why our lives suck. Being enslaved stops us from doing our duty to God and to the people in our lives, to our wives, husbands, and children. How can an enslaved man be a dutiful husband when he can never get away from his master and his work to spend time with his family? How can a wife take direction from her husband, when an enslaver runs her life? How can children obey their parents?

This petition was one of many that enslaved people wrote to the authorities of the colony of Massachusetts, and these letters were almost as outspoken as the Declaration of Independence. The signers raised excellent questions, at the right time, in the right tone of moral outrage, even before the Declaration in 1776. These petitions first popped up after British colonists—especially in Boston, British America’s biggest town—started protesting new rules on taxes and transatlantic trade imposed by London. Through street protests, letters, and petitions, British colonists claimed that London was “enslaving” them.

This is not a coincidence. Black New Englanders were well aware of the protest language that white New Englanders were using, hearing this language in homes, businesses, and on the streets of Boston, and discussing what they heard with other enslaved people. They were struck by the irony that people demanding freedom from London were okay with denying freedom to others.

Sooner Rather Than Later

As I read the first chapter of Belonging, set in the 17th century, I was fascinated to learn from Gloria Whiting that enslaved people’s awareness of the weird irony of their situation in New England, and their efforts to free themselves using literacy, started long before 1776. Dr. Whiting gave a biographical sketch of Dorcas, an enslaved young woman owned by Israel Stoughton. He was a member of the early 17th century Massachusetts elite, and he and Dorcas lived well over a century before American Independence. This was back when New Englanders really were Puritans, mostly immigrants from England.

So don’t imagine the enslaved Dorcas, having been brought from Africa, shivering in the freezing attic room of Israel Stoughton’s massive Boston mansion, like a Victorian servant. You’re thinking of Downtown Abbey or similar. Elite meant something very different in early 17th century Puritan Massachusetts.

The enslaved Dorcas and the powerful Israel lived together in a house with two rooms, or even maybe a single room, in the small coastal settlement of Dorchester. No, this is not a prelude to a story of sexual abuse. They lived in this tiny dwelling along with eleven other people, including Israel’s wife, their many kids, and white indentured servants. This was how people lived in early New England, with little or no privacy. They lived like they were camping. During the day, most people were outside. At night, everyone slept within feet or even inches of everyone else. Talk about housing density. You could hear everything.

And there was much to hear in a household led by a man like Israel Stoughton. The family (which included Dorcas and the servants) gathered early in the morning and last thing at night to hear Israel lead prayers and give a sermon from the Bible. Plus Israel talked about politics with visitors. He was deeply invested and involved in Massachusetts politics, its town meetings, its legislature, its laws. I wonder if Israel ever pondered aloud about all people being created equal? Believe it or not, that’s possible.

But let’s be clear: New Englanders like Israel Stoughton, having led an exodus of Englishmen from a life under the oppressive King Charles I (not to be confused with the very nice Charles III) paved the way to kickstarting American democracy in the early 19th century. They also practiced slavery until the early 19th century.

In the early 1600s, Dorcas, likely from West Central Africa, was sold, bought, and trafficked in a slave ship that somehow ended up in Massachusetts rather than in Virginia. Here, she quickly learned English and mastered the Puritan faith. In the cramped and crowded house, perhaps while laying the fire or sweeping the floor, she would have likely overheard political discussions between Israel Stoughton and men who stopped by to consult with him. I’m not going to do spoilers: If you want to know how Dorcas changed her own life, you need to read Gloria Whiting’s book!

Suddenly, I’m reminded of a book which shows how ideas about law spread within the black community of the 20th century South. I wrote about Dylan Penningroth’s study of the relationships between Black people and law just a few months ago:

This next bit is my take on this enslaved people’s petition from 1777 Massachusetts, not necessarily Dr. Whiting's (I haven't read her chapter yet!).

I can say this: This petition emerged from discussion of lived experience. Behind the petition’s words we can imagine very real stories: A baby seized from her mother to be sold. A man’s authority as a husband and father repeatedly overruled by the man who owned him, and terminated when that enslaver sold him away from his family, friends, and community. The child trafficked to another household, who then died. The wife raising children without her husband’s support.

This petition, in short, summarizes the most personal ways in which slavery stopped the petitioners from living normal lives. It makes statements in the first paragraph, and poses troubling questions in the second. To our modern eye, the petitioners don’t ask for much: Don’t sabotage our families. Keep us together, and let us lead normal family life.

But the right to be like everyone else, to live normally, meant freedom. Freedom was at the heart of opposition to slavery and, later, segregation. This is a protest, a radical demand, from enslaved people. How else could they have normal family life if they weren’t released from slavery?

This petition landed on the desks of the most powerful people in Massachusetts. These men believed that, as Britons, they had rights—freedom especially—that London was threatening. They were currently firing off their own letters and petitions, bitching about how the government in London was depriving them of their rights. They were also educated men, readers, who identified very strongly as Christians. Slaves’ petitions must have given them pause, because they were very reasonable arguments, using words to persuade, not threats of violence. This is why arguments made by enslaved people could not easily be dismissed by Massachusetts authorities with “Tough noogies, that’s your lot in life.”

Enslaved people themselves were the first to speak up against slavery itself. Change didn’t start with enslaved people saying stuff like “That’s the way it is, some things will never change” [apologies to Huey Lewis] Or “I like to be positive. I don’t want negativity in my life. I choose to be happy in slavery.” Or “Slavery is the future, whether we like it or not.” Change started with people protesting on the basis and within the boundaries of reality, not automatically accepting fatalism or PR happy joy joy talk.

Uh oh. I’m skipping ahead. Although I’m a historian of 18th century British America by trade, I want sometime soon to hand the mic to Gloria Whiting, or at least share it with her, because Belonging, her first book, is fantastic. Stay tuned. I will finish reading Belonging, because it has a lot more to say (as do I, but you already knew that), and then riff on some of it for you. Coming soon to Non-Boring History.

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Dear Nonnie Friend,

This is one of those Annette on the…

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The most recent posts at NBH are (Gnome gives impressive drum roll) . . . .

Richard Nixon? Adlai Stevenson? What’s going on with Annette, you very well might ask?

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Note from Annette

The dreaded tech with a mind of its own sent out an earlier draft of this post. I’ve restored the final version. —-A.

Now you see that Richard Nixon is today’s subject, you must be seriously questioning my alleged objections to Great Man history at Non-Boring History. Just to add to my sins, my most recent post was on Adlai Stevenson. Don’t know who he is? Here’s what I had to say:

But, am I really writing about another Great Man today? Maybe not. I’m writing about Richard Nixon!

Sorry, Nixon fans, I couldn’t resist. In the end, I promise, there’s plenty here to offend everyone, no matter what you think about Richard Nixon. Simply dubbing someone a hero or a villain, no matter how much we think they deserve it, doesn't help us understand the past, or get the best takeaway that learning history has to offer: Humility and doubt.

Oh, and not much previous knowledge of Nixon required today (you’ve heard of Vietnam, China, Watergate, right? Good enough!) In fact, the less the better, because my own Nixon knowledge is pretty minimal. I’m taking you on a too-short taster tour of the museum at the Nixon Library, and trying to show how, as people who don’t know everything, we might resist being taken for a ride. In my defense, I’m a historian of early America with a bit of modern Britain, who shouldn’t have been expected to teach stuff she didn’t know—but often was. That said, I did once teach about Richard Nixon, and I did it by choice.

Most American professors teach about history they hardly know, or sometimes really don't know at all, and typically not by choice. That’s not great, true. The silver lining, though, is that we can show that we don't just transmit “information”, or serve “the material” on a platter, which is what too many people think college education is all about—that and passing the tests and getting a job. We model human skills that AI doesn't seem to cultivate: curiosity, love of learning, willingness to admit ignorance, willingness to keep an open mind, human connection with our subjects and our students, humor, and even joy, as something ignites in our brains. Early in my career, long before I finally realized that modern universities and their obsession with measurable results simply got between me and my mission in life, I chose to teach about Richard Nixon, to do more than to give him a passing mention in my breakneck US survey class. That’s because I had a hunch that we would all benefit, my students and me, from taking some time to consider why we think what we think about the past, no matter our views, and how that understanding affects what we think about the present and future. That’s what a history class is supposed to do.

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Richard Nixon, Recalled

“You're looking well, Mr. President,” I said politely. “Death becomes you.” I was shaking hands with Richard Nixon in the lobby of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. We stood on a huge rendering of the US Presidential Seal, conveniently placed just in case any of us visitors had forgotten that Richard Nixon was once US President. No, the Nixon years weren’t just a weird fever dream.

“Thank you, Dr. Laing,” the late President said, with a slight quiver of his jowls. “I want my fellow Americans to know that I am still not a crook, and that I’m feeling better than ever.”

“I can see that. And that big picture of you up there?” I pointed to the huge portrait that dominated the room. “Very relaxed, very modern. Not at all the very formal image I remember you had in the Seventies.”

“That was a long time ago,” he said affably. “And as you so often observe, Dr. Laing, everything changes over time. Even me. My presidency is looking better and better these days, I’m told.”

“Well, sir, that might depend on who you ask.” His face fell, so I rushed to change the subject. “And how is Mrs. Nixon?”

“The same,” he said. “As beautiful as ever.”

Ahh, spring, when our thoughts turn naturally toward Richard Nixon! When we are tempted to forego the warm outdoors in Southern California for a visit to a mostly indoor shrine dedicated to America’s 37th President! Look, I can enjoy spring sunshine anywhere in the West. But I came to Yorba Linda, California, specifically, for only one reason: To visit the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, home to the late President’s archives, and exhibits interpreting his life.

The ghostly President Nixon now vanished, and I turned to Hoosen. “I don’t remember ever seeing a picture of Nixon looking like that,” I said, nodding at the giant portrait of a relaxed and smiling Nixon, the one in the photo above. “He always looked like he had a giant stick up his [expletive deleted].”

This post is even more of a riff than usual. I won’t cover even the “essentials” of the Nixon Presidency. Lousy survey classes and short attention spans attune everyone to think there’s a quick version of history worth knowing, and there really isn’t. My goals today are simply to get us (me too!) interested in Nixon, and get us thinking about how and why we learn about the past. I daresay China and Watergate will pop up.

This post is also only partly about Richard Nixon. It’s also about this historian bravely grappling with the subject of Nixon more years ago than I like to admit, yet too soon in historian terms (only two decades after Watergate), back when I knew even less than I do now, as a newly teaching not-quite-qualified historian, and also as a Brit, an outsider.

No matter your opinion or knowledge of Richard Nixon, I hope today’s post complicates him for you. He really is one of the most interesting figures in US history, whether you class him as a Great Man, or not, or -much better- if you are trying now to think about history without a rush to identify the goodies and baddies, which I strongly encourage you do. Good historians don’t think in black and white. I often hear regular folk tell me confidently that someone they read devotedly is a great historian, while I ruefully question whether the celeb they worship is really a historian at all. When I make the mistake of saying this aloud, I usually end up getting yelled at. But history demands we question everything, in good faith, and not just the things we don’t like.

Like a Bridge Over Troubled Water(gate)

Might as well jump in the deep end. In case you’re too young for Richard Nixon memories (as I am, TBH), the Watergate scandal was a Very Big Deal. So shocking, in fact, it made Americans way more cynical about politics and government. Watergate revealed a President who was not the person that many had innocently believed him to be, a principled and honest member of the heroic WWII generation.

Americans of both major political parties, Republicans as well as Democrats, came to understand that their President was personally involved in a cover-up of a hapless and illegal bit of political chicanery known as Watergate. With a presidential election imminent in 1972, Richard Nixon’s campaign aides from the wonderfully-nicknamed CREEP (actually CREP)—the Committee to Re-Elect the President— hired goons to break into the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC. There, they planted listening devices, pinched documents that could be used against the Democrats and their candidate . . . and got caught in the act.

Almost as scandalous, Nixon’s secretly taped conversations in the Oval Office were also revealed during the Watergate scandal. The very existence of a secret taping system in the Oval Office (first installed by FDR) came as a shock to Americans, too, since they —bless you, friends—never have quite been able to keep straight the distinction between a President and a King. Presidents weren’t meant to be in on sleazy political tricks, but the tapes, as they were gradually released, revealed that Richard Nixon was well aware of Watergate.

Things got worse for people who clutched their pearls at Presidential shenanigans. I mean, to be fair, FDR didn’t even swear, not even in private. The same could not be said of Nixon. The Oval Office tapes were transcribed by Rose Mary Woods, President Nixon’s very loyal secretary. She replaced any naughty words with the prim phrase expletive deleted, although I have learned that not every word she replaced was an expletive by normal standards. Which is interesting, because I think a lot of shocked Americans have long imagined President Nixon dropping frequent f-bombs.

Richard Nixon would almost certainly have been impeached and convicted in 1974 if he had not resigned. He possibly could have ended up in jail for covering up the antics of CREEP’s dirty tricks squad. I do remember—young though I was- how Gerald Ford, Nixon’s successor, took a lot of flak for pardoning Nixon a month after his resignation. President Ford explained that he wanted to spare the nation the agony of putting its former president on trial after two miserable years of Watergate shattering all sorts of dearly-held beliefs. Thinking about it now, that sounds reasonable to me, and Ford was a decent man by all accounts, but I quite understand if you don’t agree that he was right about this.

Nearly a quarter of voters polled by Gallup in early 1974, at the height of Watergate, remained loyal to President Richard Nixon. But I think it’s fair to say that the President had brought together almost the entire nation by then in contempt for Richard Nixon: Republicans as well as Democrats were disgusted. Watergate, and Nixon’s resignation in 1974, seemed like ancient history to me when I arrived in California from England as a teenager in 1981. But to the American adults I quickly came to know, Nixon and Watergate were yesterday. This was something I only appreciate now: Seven years is really not a long time.

It took me a long time to grasp why the California grown-ups I knew in the early 1980s spit fire at the very mention of Nixon’s name. Before you imagine my friends as long-haired hippy-dippy Californians, I will tell you now that these people—like almost everyone I knew in Sacramento— didn’t match that tired stereotype.

Annette’s Aside: My Sacramento adult friends were many of them buttoned-down New Dealers, some of them Republicans, and many of them veterans (one was a Marine). And to continue my theme of “California’s liberalism is overstated”, note that the state not only turned Illinois-born actor Ronald Reagan into a politician (elected California state governor twice) but produced Richard Nixon himself, born and raised. My dear Sacramento has never exactly been a hotbed of radicalism, but it was not nearly as conservative as was Richard Nixon’s birthplace of California’s Orange County. Living in Southern California in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I often heard jokes about living “behind the Orange Curtain.” Orange County wasn’t just conservative, you see. It was positively right-wing, one of the most right-wing places in America, a place that heartily embraced the very, very right-wing John Birch Society (which still exists, and whose members today include Steve Bannon and Alex Jones of Infowars. Yeah, that right-wing.).

Annette’s Long Aside: Tricky Dick, America, and Me

See Lizzie Borden, she’s one of the stars
And Tricky Dicky barkin’, flashin’ you his pardon
Oh, Jack the Ripper slashin’ your tires

—From Hellacious Acres by Kris Kristofferson (1976)

Even as a relative newcomer to these shores in the 1980s, I should have been aware of how big a deal was Richard Nixon’s quitting. After all, I watched him announce his resignation in real time, as a child growing up near London. I was nine years old. My dad woke me up shortly before two in the morning and hustled me downstairs, explaining “The American President is going to resign. This is the first time this has ever happened.” Sleepy but interested, I settled on the sofa as he switched on our rented TV, our first-ever color set.

As I watched, I felt sorry for Richard Nixon. I really did. I knew who he was. I had seen him on TV, because 1970s British kids watched the news (only three channels, nothing else on, TV always on). I had seen Nixon in China, Mrs. Nixon with the pandas, some mention of something bad called Watergate. Now, as I watched, President Nixon seemed to me to be holding back tears, and having never seen a grown man cry, I felt very awkward.

I just now did a memory check, taking a quick skim of the resignation speech on YouTube. I was surprised to see that the two veteran journos who commented immediately after the speech, Walter Cronkite and Eric Severeid, around the same age and of the same WWII generation as Richard Nixon, appeared more shaken and choked up than had the resigning President. I find myself wondering if I have muddled up the resignation speech with Nixon’s far more obviously emotional farewell to the White House staff, but I don’t remember watching that at the time.

Memories play tricks, sure, but our perceptions of the past keep changing for many reasons. The first and foremost is that historical context changes constantly, even when we don’t notice, and especially when we do. Consider the Presidency: A lot of Americans in 2016 found President Trump’s, shall we say, informality refreshing, while others, appalled, have expressed longing for a return to a more formal communication style from the White House. That sudden shift in White House norms may be having an impact on how people think of Richard Nixon, who was definitely old-school in his self-presentation. Even Nixon’s disgraced Attorney-General John Mitchell’s widely-reported and shocking warning to genteel Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, as her reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein investigated Watergate (Mitchell said that “Katie Graham … is gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published”), seems slightly less shocking now. Still a bit gross. But less surprising.

Facts are the building blocks of history, but perceptions are really what make history challenging to write. How do we recapture the mood of a bygone era? Even talking to sharp ninetysomethings with excellent memories (which I do) doesn’t tell me as much as I would like, because they didn’t get stuck in the 1940s, but changed their takes as they aged, and in tune with changes in the times. This is why historians, while we use oral history interviews when we can, are deeply attached to archives, and the vast numbers of historical documents they contain. Imperfect though letters, diaries, memos, and other papers are as evidence (and what evidence isn’t imperfect?) they don’t change.

Unlike living people, papers are unsullied by nostalgia, present-mindedness, and wishful thinking. That’s why the most valuable part of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum is the Library—which isn’t really a library as people understand it, but an archive of Nixon’s papers, only open to researchers. And like any historian, I bring my own take to Richard Nixon or any subject of my times, fighting my own present-mindedness, wishful thinking, and 70s nostalgia as best I can.

Annette’s Aside: Swimmin Through the 1970s, and Teaching Nixon

Capturing the “feel”, the culture, of a bygone time is very hard for a historian or anyone else. I chatted recently with my niece, She Who Must Not Be Named On the Internets, SWMNBNOTI, aka Swimmin Benoti. Last time I mentioned Swimmin at NBH, in 2021, she was about to start high school. Now she’s an art history student at a small liberal arts college in California. She has a highly-informed understanding of the 1970s “vibe”. She’s a huge fan of 1970s icon Kate Bush, which is impressive, like me being a Glenn Miller fan in the 70s (which I was). Her fandom of Kate Bush makes Swimmin even dearer to my heart. Frankly, I get the impression that Swimmin understands the 1970s even better than I do. And I lived through them. As a historian, I shouldn’t be surprised: It’s hard to see the forest when you’re surrounded by the trees.

Be warned that Richard Nixon, that 1970s icon of [insert your preferred phrase], still has his hooks in my childish heart. I can’t claim that I ever wanted to study Richard Nixon as a professional historian. That’s because, first, I have only recently conceded that the Nixon Presidency might now belong to history rather than to the domain of current events. And, second, I have long been convinced that the best history is the history that includes everyone, because history that’s only about ‘Great Men’ leaves so many questions unanswered. I say that as someone writing about Richard Nixon, whose most recent post was on Adlai Stevenson (cough). Don’t worry, I plan to do something very different soon. Variety is the spice of Non-Boring History.

So I have had a bit of a soft spot for Richard Nixon ever since I watched him look so sad when I was nine.

The Reader Relations Gnome at Non-Boring House welcomes your comments on Dr. Laing’s surprising feeling of sympathy for Richard Nixon. Please record your remarks on reel-to-reel tape, deleting any expletives, and then—and this is important— wipe clean the 18.5 minutes of your commentary that you believe most valuable. Finally, please refuse to send the tape to us until we issue a Congressional subpoena for it, and the Supreme Court of the United States orders you to pop it in the mail to us. Thank you.

I didn’t want to devote my life to studying Richard Nixon, but, early in my career, I was keen to teach about him, as best I could: He was such a divisive figure, yet I saw in Nixon enormous potential for a non-partisan teaching exercise. In the mid-1990s, while finishing up my PhD in Southern California, I started teaching adjunct (part-time) classes. One of my first gigs was a class at a small community college (Brits: Open admissions, two year degrees, mostly vocational training, but all students were required to take history).

I had recently visited the nearby Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, Nixon’s hometown, with a retired teacher friend. Having been founded recently, in 1990, and by friends and fans of the still-living President, who was at the grand opening, it was entertainingly biased. Now I had an idea for using this museum in my teaching: After having my students each read and report on one book on some aspect of Nixon’s career, I took them on a field trip to the Nixon Library, each of them to decide for themselves how the museum’s interpretation compared and contrasted with those of the historians and journalists who wrote the books. Without a transportation budget, my class carpooled to the Library.

“The Nixon Project” was a nice break from our otherwise standard plod through the superficial US history survey. This was my first time teaching how museums interpret history, and I had a blast. My students were diverse in every way, politically, generationally, and ethnically, but judging from their reactions and the class evaluations, they genuinely enjoyed the Nixon Project. It was an eye-opener to think about what a museum’s agenda might be. I was thrilled to see them respond, as people who had known only a simple choice between Nixon Bad/Nixon Good. Self-identified Democrats in the class were amazed and impressed that Nixon signed off on women’s rights, civil rights, and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Republicans were appalled by what they learned about Watergate and Nixon’s conduct of Vietnam. Had I thought of it then, and better known my subject, I would have asked how much Nixon’s decisions reflected his own views, and how much they were directed by advisers (think Henry Kissinger), and especially public opinion and the need of a politician to get votes. No politician works in a vacuum.

I’ve been meaning to get back to visit the Nixon Library ever since, to see how it has changed since the early 90s. When I realized that it’s been more than thirty years, I made my return a priority. I still hesitated because, well, L.A. is a major detour from our destination, L.A. traffic is insane, and hotel prices even more so: Yorba Linda is near Disneyland, and no, I am not paying $500 a night for any hotel, ever, much less for a room in an economy chain establishment that would cost about $130-$150 anywhere else.

So last month, Hoosen and I came up with a cunning plan to visit the Nixon Library for less: First, we found ourselves a big discount with a coupon. Second, we spent the nights before and after in the unfashionable and affordable towns of Barstow and Bakersfield.

All told, we drove about 450 miles that day, with a three hour museum visit in between. Recall that I take photos of absolutely everything I possibly can at the places we visit, so museum visits for Non-Boring History are never casual affairs, they cost much time and money, and I do need your help to do this work, because most readers are chucking money at writers who affirm their politics by hiding behind the word “history”. This one ain’t.

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Disorientation

On our way to the first exhibit hall of the Richard Nixon Presidential Museum, we wandered through a huge display of kids’ artwork. These were the submissions in an annual contest the Nixon Library runs among local schoolkids. This year, the official theme was the 250th anniversary of the US.

Richard Nixon and patriotism make for an awkward combination, from the perspective of 1974. I don’t doubt that the continued rehabbing of Richard Nixon is much of the thinking behind the youth art contest, as it is behind the Nixon Library itself. But young folk have their own ideas.

Orange County is far more economically and ethnically diverse today than it was in Richard Nixon’s early 20th century childhood, or during my years in Southern California in the 1980s and 1990s. Times have changed, and, to repeat, young people have their own ideas—they aren’t just receptacles for what adults tell them, as any parent or teacher of teens can tell you. One bit of art that earned an honorable mention in the contest was by an older teen with a Latino last name. Hers was a photo of a huge American flag hanging in a capitol building, probably California’s, maybe the national capitol in DC. She titled her picture “United Under Our Flag,” make of that what you will. Another photo, by a Latino teen of the same age, shows two passports—one US, one from Mexico—and a framed picture of a young man in military uniform. This is no longer 1974, and this was no reference to Vietnam, let’s put it that way.

Things have also changed at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. When I first brought students to the Nixon Library in 1993 or so, it was owned and operated by the Richard Nixon Foundation, a group of friends and supporters of the former president, ranging from old pals to grateful oil companies.

In 2007, the National Archives and Record Administration, a US federal government agency, took charge. Ever since, they have run the show in what I can only hope is an uneasy partnership with the Nixon Foundation—if it’s not uneasy, it’s not being done right. I could see the tug of war at times. In the end, however, the Nixon Library’s museum is like all Presidential Library museums—it stands by its man.

Speaking of standing by your man . . . As ever, I wanted to start this museum visit with the orientation film. Outside the theater entrance stood a perfectly-coiffed older lady, absolutely still. I briefly and weirdly wondered if this was a wax statue of Pat Nixon. But then she moved, and revealed herself to be not the late Mrs. Nixon, but a friendly volunteer with disappointing news: The movie theatre was under renovation. That was a shame: No matter how bad, an orientation film tends to hit on many key relevant aspects of a museum’s theme and makes more sense of the museum experience. Unprepared, we headed into the first gallery.

Richard Nixon: Decide for Yourself

Here’s how things began. A photo of Nixon, both arms outstretched, fingers in victory signs, and this text:

RICHARD NIXON: A LIFE IN THE ARENA

WHO WAS RICHARD NIXON?

From his humble beginnings until his death in 1994, Richard Nixon spent much of his life working and striving, rising and falling and rising again, and always “daring greatly” in whatever arena he entered.

The legacy of Richard Nixon’s 50 years in the arena— as Theodore Roosevelt called the political world— remains controversial: Was he a peacemaker or a warmonger? Did he bring the country together or did he divide it? Did he leave the nation and the world a better place or not?

The answers are far from simple.

So as you walk through these galleries, take a moment to step into a President’s shoes. Explore Richard Nixon’s life and career from the inside and come to your own conclusions.

Decide for yourself: Who was Richard Nixon?

Ooh! I endorse this question being asked of the visitor! That’s what any legit historian should do, while pointing out that the evidence on which our decisions are based is not always complete or without bias. I was keen to get started, to see how much evidence the museum would give that would allow visitors to come to any kind of deeper understanding of Richard Nixon and his times. I was skeptical. But what followed this panel, honestly, was a complete surprise, even a shock.

Out of Chaos

This very first exhibit didn’t start with Richard Nixon’s birth, childhood, and emergence as a politician. Nor did it start with Watergate, or with Nixon’s sort-of rehab in the early 1990s. It didn’t start with Richard Nixon at all. Instead, it began with the chaos of the 1960s that got Nixon elected to the Presidency in 1968, on a promise to restore law and order, and a stated determination to end the war in Vietnam, without US national humiliation. These were powerful selling points: Regardless of political label, most people rather like peace, stability, and predictability, not war and chaos.

And boy, was there chaos in America in the Sixties. This hallway took us through mayhem until we reached the photo mural of Nixon at the end of the hall, visible in the photo above, in which he was giving his two-handed victory wave, beneath a huge banner declaring NIXON’S THE ONE. Yes, he’s The One! He’ll bring our nightmare to an end! That’s what the slogan promised: President as savior.

The Sixties: A Nation in Turmoil. That was the theme. At each step of the way, on both sides of the room, videos threw death, riot, and disaster at an unprepared Hoosen and me. I started noticing that while every video was different, clips of the same infamous violent events kept popping up in video after video. By the time we were done, we had seen more than once —just examples—the stunning assassinations of JFK in Dallas, RFK in Los Angeles, and Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis. The video repetition is intentional: No visitor who doesn’t just charge through the hall can escape the horror, the chaos, a message being shoveled on us. It was a bit of a relief to get to a smiling Richard Nixon. Which also made me think about what the Museum was saying.

The chaos hallway is not all negative, and that’s by design, too. Sympathetic photo backdrops portray, for example, the peaceful Civil Rights Movement, like the photo above, in which someone is carrying the sign “Segregation is Morally Wrong.” Even the Black Panthers, not a group that generally gets a fair shake from Nixon fans, is awarded a favorable set of images, of voter registration drives. Nothing is here by accident, as in every museum exhibit. The message, true or not, is that Richard Nixon had no issues with peaceful protest against racial segregation. The other message that came across to me from the text beneath the exhibit title (The Sixies: A Nation in Turmoil) is that Richard Nixon was not responsible for the mess he inherited, that he “didn’t start the fire,” to quote Billy Joel’s song.

True, Vietnam didn’t start with Nixon. The cluster[expletive deleted] of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, shaken journos and young protestors being roughed up by cops and hired goons, didn’t start with Nixon either. Violence against civil rights protestors before his election—not Nixon’s fault.

But now Nixon was here to save the day. Next up in the exhibits: 1968 election night, as seen on TV. California and Illinois voters go for Nixon, and that clinches it. Finally, TV journo Chet Huntley makes it official, declares to the nation that, indeed, Nixon’s the One.

That’s the big theme of this entire museum: As President, Richard Nixon played the lousy hand he was dealt, and he played it very well.

The hand he was dealt? The most conspicuous card was the Vietnam war, which was killing tens of thousands of young Americans by 1968. There’s more: Dysfunctional foreign policy that had done nothing to address the alienation of the Soviet bloc and China from the US, and which had taken America to the brink of nuclear catastrophe with the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962. Frightening domestic turmoil, from urban riots to serial killers. Who could fix all this? Why, Nixon of course! Nixon’s the One! Shame about Watergate and all that, but hey.

This was the mess, says the Museum, that Richard Nixon walked into in 1968, duly elected by a slim majority of voters. I thought about this. Nixon was elected with the conditional support of older Americans, including the parents of dead troops in Vietnam, Americans who had lived through WWII, the “good war”, who didn’t want to admit military defeat, even if that meant other sons being sent to Vietnam to die. He was elected by Americans who had voted for Franklin Roosevelt, who loved FDR’s New Deal, but who didn’t yet realize that the New Deal was now what held America together, the idea of a federal government that didn’t just let people sink or swim. Americans took for granted New Deal America, and postwar prosperity. The only way for Republicans to stay in office was not to challenge the New Deal consensus. Nothing suggested to most people that, in fact, the effort had already begun under Nixon to return Republicans to power, with the goal of eroding the New Deal project. This entire paragraph? My take. Not the Museum’s, but what they had inadvertently spurred me to think.

The Richard Nixon of 1968 was not presented by the Museum as a divisive figure. Quite the reverse. He was elected on a platform of bringing people together, and especially those he identified as his base, the “silent majority” of Americans. He promised to return law and order to America’s streets. He pledged to bring America peace (but with honor!) with an end to the Vietnam War. No hint of an attack on the New Deal, on federal government spending, especially on social programs, and especially not on Social Security, the New Deal’s greatest accomplishment. It would have been political suicide to attack the New Deal head on. Nixon was not The One to do that. But he would pave the way.

Unlike his Democratic opponent Hubert Humphrey, the Presidential candidate who emerged from the mess that was his party in 1968, Nixon did not heap praise on the Great Society programs of former President Lyndon B. Johnson. These had aimed to end poverty among Americans, including Americans of color. LBJ had instead spent the money on Vietnam. Humphrey, who had been Johnson’s vice-president, also staunchly supported the Vietnam War, so his appeal to a majority of Democratic voters was not obvious. Nixon had a clearer message, or so it seemed: Unite Americans.

I inspected a display of Nixon campaign badges. Many were in languages other than English, and especially Spanish. Let’s not assume that Nixon—or any politician of the modern age— was only appealing to white voters. He wasn’t. He couldn’t. America had already changed.

Peace and Love

In his inaugural speech as President, in 1969, Richard Nixon promised peace. Not just peace (with honor!) in Vietnam, but around the world, and especially within the United States. He pledged his support for civil rights, promising one nation of black and white, not two (Latinos and Asians and American Indians were backgrounded in this discussion, but I guess they were implied. Unlike the West, the East thought in black and white). On this issue, Nixon sounded more like an Eastern Establishment silver spoon liberal, the kind he didn’t trust, than the up-from-humble-roots California Republican he was. Heck, he even endorsed and increased affirmative action, the DEI of its time.

From the inauguration display, Hoosen and I walked directly into the Oval Office, or rather, the reproduction of the Oval Office as it appeared during the Nixon administration.

OMG, is that Pat Nixon hiding behind the lampshade???

No, of course she was not the late Pat Nixon. I’m being silly and a bit crass. She was the same volunteer we had met earlier, and may I just say here, joking aside, how very kind and informative she was? I wish I had caught her name. She kindly took photos of people sitting behind the President’s desk, which is not—surprise— a copy of the famous Resolute desk.

Every President, she told me, gets to choose how to decorate the Oval Office, which made me think a bit. President Nixon preferred a desk he had been told was used by President Woodrow Wilson (it wasn’t) whom he much admired, so what’s in the pretendy Oval Office is a repro of Wilson’s alleged desk, not the better-known Resolute desk. The Resolute desk, our guide told me, was made from the remains of the HMS Resolute, a British ship sent to rescue the doomed expedition of explorer Sir John Franklin. Franklin had sailed to Canada in hope of finding a Northwest passage to the Pacific, and ended up, as tended to happen to such clueless 19th century adventurers , dead along with his crew. The Resolute, the rescue ship, was itself surrounded by ice and abandoned in 1854. But it was towed the following year by an American whaling ship, repaired, and returned to Britain as a diplomatic gift. In return, when the ship was hacked up in 1879, bits of it were made into the Resolute desk, which was sent to the White House (regifted, really). Ever since, most Presidents have used this desk (including President Trump). Richard Nixon was the notable exception.

Pat Nixon, the real one, was otherwise put in charge of Oval Office decoration. She liked gold. Not bright shiny gold, but the dull mustardy color called Sungold that was hugely popular in the 1970s, for reasons that escape me. So Mrs. Nixon picked out the gold sofas—or, rather, the originals on which the sofas in the Museum were based. The gold was reflected in the curtains and—nice touch—George Washington’s waistcoat in his portrait facing the desk. I sat on the fake Oval Office’s repro sofas, and admired how large and sparse is this room, a bit empty and functional. I was not surprised to learn that President Nixon preferred to work in a smaller, cozier space, with a comfy chair and an ottoman on which to prop his legs. Much better, especially for a guy who was prone to blood clots (something we have in common, me and Dick Nixon, just saying).

I looked through the French doors at a photo mural of the Rose Garden, a Rose Garden that still had a lawn, and thought of the East Wing in which Pat Nixon and her team worked.

From enjoying hanging out in the Oval Office (I took a photo of Hoosen sitting at the Resolute desk), we barely had time to catch our breath before we plunged into Vietnam. Same might be said for President Richard Nixon.

One . . . Two . . . Three . . . What Are We Fighting For?

So much for that happy photo of Nixon and LBJ smiling, shaking hands, and looking bro-ish! We didn’t even get through the door into the Vietnam room before this message was shouted at us from the wall: VIETNAM, AN INHERITED WAR. Just in case we had forgotten that Richard Nixon didn’t start the fire.

Having dived headfirst into the crisis-laden times in which Richard Nixon became President, the late 1960s, we were now going deep into what was probably the most crisis-y crisis of the moment, the Vietnam War, with NOT NIXON’S FAULT ringing in our ears.

I don’t know how many visitors to museums pay close enough attention to take in museum messages, whether consciously or subliminally, however loudly they’re shouted from the walls. Most people think of museums as places where Important Things are Stored, and so focus on the artifacts, rather than on the stories being told through text. But if visitors are paying attention at all to words, they get this: Vietnam was not Nixon’s doing, you know! It was the Other Guys who started it!

But, Laing, isn’t that true?

Oh, heck, yes, reader! American involvement in Vietnam (then French Indo-China) started under Nixon’s predecessors. I’m not even talking his immediate predecessor, the guy most associated with the war, Lyndon Baines Johnson. I’m not talking JFK. The mess we call Vietnam started under Dwight D. Eisenhower, or maybe even earlier, with Harry Truman following the mistaken belief that all Communist nations were in cahoots with each other. Eisenhower started sending money and military advisers. JFK escalated the war a bit. LBJ escalated it a LOT.

It’s also true that every President inherits a bushel of problems from his predecessors, from Congress, and from the past in general. But Nixon, no question, took decisive action which put him firmly in the driver’s seat of the Vietnam War. He announced his plan of action to the American public in early 1970, after a year in office, and after he had successfully campaigned on a platform of peace “with honor” in Vietnam. He had already ordered the invasion of neighboring Cambodia. The museum frames this action as “Pursuing the Peace”, arguing that Nixon took this drastic step, expanding the war to end it, only because the North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese governments had refused to compromise. Whatever the truth (and I honestly don’t know) this is not how the invasion announcement was understood at the time by huge numbers of Americans, especially among the young. As my old professor of British history John Phillips liked to say, perception is reality. It shapes what people think and do.

Again, I felt the inadequacy of my knowledge to do more than just perceive, and be a bit skeptical. The invasion of Cambodia—a matter of foreign policy— and the American public’s response to it—which is really part of domestic affairs— much less the entire Vietnam War—can’t adequately be summed up in a paragraph or two on the wall of a museum, much less in this post. To be sure of what I’m talking about, I need to read books on the subject of Nixon and Vietnam. As does anyone who seriously wants to know, much less claim any kind of expertise. This is why historians commenting on the present or recent past have no business presenting ourselves as infallible expert guides who never make mistakes.

Interesting that this panel says that Nixon “increased military action while beginning to decrease American troop levels.” Hmm. It doesn’t actually say what military action he took, and how “increased military action” decreased the number of American soldiers in Vietnam. Basically, I guessed that since he had ordered the US Air Force to drop bombs on Cambodia from a great height, fewer American ground troops were needed. I am not passing judgment on this, but I am interested that significant details were not mentioned at all in this panel, the one most likely to be read by visitors.

Similarly, the info panel explains Nixon’s big strategy in foreign policy, including ending the Vietnam War the “right way”, not the “easy way”, by defrosting relationships with the USSR and China. But it doesn’t explain that many Americans were upset by the President’s announcement, or why.

And American public opinion, regardless of facts, mattered. Something that had changed by 1969 was that, unlike previous wars, Vietnam was coming into American living rooms every night, and in living color, and Americans were making up their own minds about the war. Iconic newsman “Uncle” Walter Cronkite was among them: He had actually visited Vietnam, in early 1968, chatted with troops, and come to a conclusion. In a highly unusual on-air editorial, Cronkite pronounced the war unwinnable. LBJ was now convinced that his presidency was doomed. But whether Cronkite actually changed views on the war—including his own—is debated. No doubt, TV, like social media today, exposed more American civilians to the sights of war, and those who felt betrayed by Nixon were genuinely distressed by what they had witnessed in their living rooms.

This Vietnam room had lots of images of American servicemen being brutalized at the so-called “Hanoi Hilton”, a notorious prison camp where the North Vietnamese refused to extend the protections of the Geneva Convention to POWs they had labeled “war criminals” for simply participating in the war. To the museum’s credit, it points out that the South Vietnamese government, America’s ally, also mistreated captured North Vietnamese soldiers. This was complicated.

Speaking of multiple perspectives, the Vietnam room features a large photo of Nixon with telegrams (think emails today) piled high on his desk. In front of the photo are stacks of the actual telegrams, from the archives. Whether reflecting reality or not, and I genuinely don’t know, the telegrams in the display that visitors can read have a definite bias toward those in favor of continuing the war:

While the Vietnam room shows many photos of the American prisoners of war who were brutalized by the North Koreans, it does not depict their torture—which while apparently not caught on camera, absolutely happened. But photos of the human suffering that most increased the American public’s revulsion toward the war, such as the 1972 image dubbed Napalm Girl, of a screaming child who had just been doused in burning jellied gasoline by South Vietnamese (US allied) planes, and another (“Saigon Execution”] of a young Viet Cong fighter being summarily executed by a South Vietnamese officer (an American ally) in the street, are also missing.

In fairness, both of these horrific images could be exhibitions by themselves, given their complicated contexts. At the time, Americans got little context or complication from their TVs. But just as one small example of details that can give us pause today, decades later: The South Vietnamese general who shot dead the young fighter later emigrated to the US. When his identity was revealed, and he was threatened with deportation, he was allowed to remain by intervention of President Jimmy Carter, who called the case against him “historical revisionism”. Er, what? This begs the question of why Carter came to his defense. That, I don’t know, and don’t have time to get into, but wow, right?

All of this made me uncomfortably aware of how little I know about Vietnam, Jimmy Carter, and Richard Nixon, and how vulnerable I am in any Presidential Library Museum, institutions not known for their impartiality.

This is also why trying to learn “everything” about the past isn’t nearly as valuable as learning a few things deeply and well enough to understand that it’s all complicated. History should breed humility about the depth of our knowledge.

That’s asking a lot of the public, and the public includes me. I’m an early Americanist, and I bring some skills to every museum and historic site I visit, but Nixon? I find myself more surprised than ever by how complicated he and his legacy seem to me.

Domestic and Foreign Accomplishments

Complicated history does make the brain hurt, like a good workout. Maybe that’s why, after the messiness and misery of the Vietnam exhibit, it felt like a relief to get to the bit of the Museum celebrating President Richard Nixon’s finest moments. I only have a couple of vague memories of my last visit to the Nixon Library, three decades ago, and one is of what was then called (I think?) the Domestic Accomplishments room, a brightly-lit space dominated by classical columns and rows of American flags.

Now, in the updated Museum, the highlights of the Nixon Presidency —foreign as well as domestic—are celebrated in a big space with other rooms off it. In the middle—awkwardly—is a strange little hut, which is not about Nixon’s Yellow Notepads as the photo suggests—that display is on the outside—but about Pat Nixon as First Lady. Here was Pat, hidden away in purdah, in her hut, and yet the exhibit suggested she was quite the feminist. Ooooh—-kaay then.

Pat Nixon, feminist? That’s a bit of a stretch to anyone who has ever been fascinated by videos of an apparently frozen Pat Nixon devotedly gazing at her husband with a glazed half-smile. The early 1970s teased us with the idea that women might actually be people, so I can’t blame the Museum for making a valiant attempt to include the First Lady, then known formally as Mrs. Richard Nixon (BTW, I was shocked by this “Mrs. Joe Smith” nonsense among older women when I came from the UK to California in 1981. Good Lord.) Displays showed Pat Nixon looking keenly interested in cancer research. Hey, Richard Nixon approved billions of dollars in funding cancer research! The Museum does not, so far as I could see, also note that he made big cuts in science and medical research more generally.

(BTW, your eyes don’t deceive you: In my photo above, there’s a big copy of the famous picture of Nixon and Elvis Presley, from when a slightly drugged Elvis turned up at the White House to offer the President his personal help with the Vietnam War. Can’t make this stuff up.)

Only Nixon Could Go to China

No question, Richard Nixon’s visit to Communist China was the highlight of his Presidency. He was Mr. Anti-Communism, after all: He had launched his political career as a leading light on the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, which led the charge against Communists (and alleged Communists) in every area of American public life. That’s why, as the saying goes, “Only Nixon could go to China”. This astonishing step was a sign, I suppose, of Nixon (or, more to the point, his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger) thinking out of the box. Nixon, the museum told me, was realizing how America and the world could benefit if America could stop lumping all the Communists together as the Red Menace, if he could drive a wedge between China and the USSR, and deal with them separately.

The upshot? Ping-pong, pandas at the Washington Zoo, global trade, the building of the World Trade Center in New York, a step back from the nuclear brink, and, in our times, a huge influx of cheap Chinese stuff coming into American homes, for better and for worse, allowing us to pretend we’re all rich while our incomes decline. There was more, a massive amount of knowledge, especially science and manufacturing, making a one-way journey to Beijing. I remember one of several academic colleagues (not in history) who participated in an exchange with a Chinese university about twenty years ago. I asked how his visit to China had gone. “Oh, they were very interested in what we do,” he said in surprise. “I bet they were,” I muttered cynically. I mean, even the very little I had learned about Chinese history told me the Chinese were historically very keen on nicking, I mean, borrowing ideas from wherever they could without getting too much involved with foreigners. But I digress.

Missing in Action

So Nixon created the federal Environmental Protection Agency. He also signed off on Title IX, creating funding for women’s sports. He signed the go-ahead on all sorts of liberal causes, including affirmative action… maybe because, politically, what else could he do? I mean, I hate to quote Otto Von Bismarck, but politics really is the art of the possible: You can’t go up against the collective will of the people if you value your career in elected government. If Nixon wanted to push things to the right, even just to make Republicans more electable, he had to start where most Americans were, which was basically satisfied with what FDR had put in place. And that meant the only Republicans getting elected to the Presidency were men who didn’t openly challenge the New Deal, men like Eisenhower and Nixon.

Neither here nor anywhere else, so far as Hoosen and I could see, did the Nixon Museum discuss the origins of the Southern Strategy. Richard Nixon and Arizona politician Barry Goldwater (who lost the Presidency in a landslide to LBJ, a white Southerner with progressive views on civil rights, in 1964) realized that Republicans might never again run American government except as, well, Pretendy Democrats. So they began exploring how the Republican Party might change things, first by recruiting the huge number of white Southerners angry with the Democratic Party’s role in promoting civil rights, by tapping into their racism without admitting that this was what they were doing. This policy later proved wildly successful in electing Ronald Reagan—please bear with me here, Reagan fans. Ever wonder why Reagan launched his 1980 Presidential campaign by talking up states’ rights (which were never discussed in the mid-19th century without reference to preserving slavery—seriously) in a tiny Mississippi town called Philadelphia, which was known only for being where three young civil rights workers were murdered in cold blood in 1964? I’m afraid there’s only one answer to that: The Southern Strategy. Ronald Reagan didn’t start that fire, but his fellow Californian Richard Nixon did. Again, neither Hoosen nor I saw a single mention of the Southern Strategy in the Nixon Museum. If it’s there and we missed it, I’m sorry, but it’s well-hidden.

Watergate, Then and Now

Can’t hide Watergate, of course. Which is not to say that the original version of the Museum, which I toured in the 90s, didn’t try. It offered a Watergate display that, regardless of their politics, my students found hilarious. The Watergate exhibit was a narrow darkened hallway, with a sparse and dry Watergate timeline presented on a black background in tiny lit-up letters. Even if you could get interested enough to try reading said timeline, you would soon feel pressure to move on as other visitors crowded in behind you. And on either side of the floor stretched those little lighted strips you get on airplane aisles: Hurry up, folks! You need to leave! Keep walking! Nothing to see here!

Today, Watergate is still a timeline in a hallway, but although the hallway is now wide and well-lit, it features far more text than ever.

Really, if the museum is serious about teaching Watergate, it ought to offer a movie. I looked at bits and pieces of the displays, but it was just too much text, even for me, and especially to read and try to take in while standing. Video clips include an interview with Nixon aide Chuck Colson, who I just now learned was described as an “evil genius” by a journo who covered him, and as a “hit man” by his colleague and fellow Watergate conspirator H.R. Haldeman, which is really saying something.

Colson was among those aides to Nixon who, unlike Nixon, went to prison for Watergate. As soon as he was accused, Colson announced his sudden conversion to evangelical Christianity. Conversion to Christianity, which can happen in a moment in the evangelical creed, is a convenient and perfect form of image rehab in America—and what sort of terrible person would question Colson’s sincerity? Well, me for one, because a claim of having accepted Christ tends to insulate shamed Americans from any further criticism. I have long said that I would be much more successful if I just called myself the Reverend Annette. I’m looking up more stuff just now, just some basic facts, and I learn Colson was released from prison early, after only seven months, because of a family crisis. And what was that crisis? His college-age son was arrested on drug-dealing changes, and needed Daddy at his side. Can’t make this stuff up.

This is one of the enormous challenges of writing NBH: The more I know, the more I want to learn, and then I have to figure how to share with you in a post that doesn’t take forever to write, or is too long to read.

FWIW, Colson’s recorded memories of Nixon in the museum clips were brutally honest—in Colson’s retelling, the Nixon of Watergate was an isolated and slightly deranged figure. I guess Nixon should have announced his conversion to evangelical Christianity. In real life, he was a non-practicing Quaker, and Quakerism—which had influenced him for life— remained his identity.

Then came the President’s resignation, and disgrace. An attempt at rehab came later, in both life and museum, when Richard Nixon agreed to a series of interviews with British journo David Frost in 1977, just three years after he quit. He admitted to having done wrong:

A TURNING POINT

“ I let down my friends, I let down the country, I let down our system of government and the dreams of all those young people that ought to get into government but will think it is all too corrupt ... And I have to carry that burden with me for the rest of my life.

RICHARD NIXON, FROM INTERVIEW AIRING MAY 5, 1977

Nixon was again resurrected in the 1990s, when Bill Clinton sought his advice. He never really went away. That’s all in the Museum, and it’s great, and I have awesome photos, but this post is already too long.

A Better Nixon

After that, things in the museum suddenly leaped backward, to 1913, when Richard Nixon was born to a devout Quaker family in the California farming community of Yorba Linda, on his parents’ lemon ranch, in a flat-pack house ordered from Sears. The house is outside, and you can tour it, which I did in the 1990s, but not this time, because, well, time. We had a long drive ahead, and after three hours, I was dragging a bit.

Here comes the impression the Library wants us to leave with: Not the disgraced President, not even his comeback to advise Bill Clinton on foreign policy, but the hardworking poor Quaker boy, the eager young lawyer, the poker-playing WWII Navy man in the South Pacific who kindly cooked and served hamburgers to his comrades, the author of sincere love letters to Pat Ryan, who became Pat Nixon, and to whom he was devoted. Arriving at her funeral, he was openly sobbing: The image is haunting.

The museum showed us so many Richard Nixons, even the Nixon Halloween costumes that Watergate inspired. But —and this bears repeating— the early Richard Nixon is the one the Museum wanted us to take home with us. Not the Richard Nixon of Watergate or Vietnam or the Chequers Speech, or even the Nixon of “Sock it to me?” , in which he made a fun cameo on popular comedy show Laugh-in. The Museum certainly did not want us to leave thinking of the Nixon of Watergate, or of a Richard Nixon who beat his wife. Yeah, I just read that, just now. Wow. The Nixon Library and the Nixon family has denied or not responded to this and other reports from journos, of Pat Nixon in the hospital with two black eyes in 1974—and reporters testified this wasn’t the first time. As ever, the rest of us get to decide what to think, best we can, on the basis of what is almost always incomplete info. Or maybe it’s time that we accepted that nobody—including “Great Men” and maybe Richard Nixon especially—is uncomplicated, or even all that great.

Goodbye, President Nixon?

As Richard and Pat Nixon took off in the helicopter that airlifted them from the White House and Washington, Pat murmured "It’s so sad . . . so sad,” to nobody in particular. And, really, no matter what our political views, it was a bit sad. Americans would never again live their lives thinking comfortably of government, politics, the US Presidency as most had seen them under FDR and his successors, as institutions that served the good of the people. Richard Nixon didn’t want cynicism to be his legacy, but he knew it was. He was, in the end, a little man behind a curtain, as are we all.

Is that my final judgment? No, certainly not. As the context keeps changing, so does Richard Nixon, even long after his death, and so do we.

—Final words of Richard Nixon’s resignation speech.

I cannot sustain Non-Boring History without a supply of new paying readers. This is not greed, but reality: NBH costs money to write, and I would ask readers who think all reading should be free to reconsider. I’m a trained historian, a novelist, a working writer, and a dedicated missionary for history, not an ambitious fool “building an audience” with dreams of fame and fortune. If I were that drearily ambitious, I would be ranting (one way or the other) about the current President to an audience eager to hear their views affirmed, because that’s the key to newsletter writers making a living, or even a fortune, in 2026. And that’s simply not good for us, for integrity, for anyone. I ask for your support as encouragement and in order to keep doing what I’m doing. Thank you.

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